4K Bluray Discs Shrink to BD25?

[PaulM2]

Hi everyone, I'm about to decide if I should buy a 4K TV and as a good collector and lover of physical media this question has been on my mind, most of the titles I'm looking for on blu-ray aren't sold in my country so I have to look for other ways . I often need to locate a movie in blu-ray iso or BDMV but I rarely find it with seeds, even on private websites. The problem is that most of the seeds are in full 4K blu-ray torrents with almost 100GB, but here in Brazil physical media is almost dead, including empty media for burning, you can even find 25GB media to buy online with some difficulty, 50GB? rarely, and if you do, it's very expensive. I currently use DVDFab to compress BD50 media to BD25 and I really don't think there's much loss of visual quality (although the bitrate does drop a lot). So my question is, do you think it's worth burning complete disks in BD25 or should I just stick with the originals in 1080p and not not buying a 4K TV?

[RitaXie]

If you're already using DVDFab to compress BD50 to BD25 and you're satisfied with the visual quality, that's actually a solid setup. Especially for most movies, where extreme clarity differences aren't noticeable unless you're pixel-peeping on a huge screen.

As for whether to buy a 4K TV — I'd say yes, it's still worth it, even if you're mainly watching compressed BD25 or 1080p content. Modern 4K TVs upscale 1080p surprisingly well, and having the option for native 4K content (when you do get access to it) is a nice future-proofing move. Also, HDR support on many 4K titles (even when compressed) can make a bigger difference than just resolution alone.

Burning full 4K discs to BD25 isn't ideal due to size and compression limits — you'd lose HDR metadata and possibly audio quality — but for 1080p and downscaled 4K-to-BD25 backups, I think you're in a good spot. If blank discs are hard to find, maybe consider archiving to a hard drive or NAS instead?