Just to point out a few things, which a entire user posted about, which is something I stumbled upon. But, agree with, mostly. Here is a summary of the posts, in-short:

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the video that CR puts up for their customers to watch should be as flawless as possible. Even if their bitrates still may not be enough to achieve that, they could certainly improve their video quality notably (especially for the worse cases) by doing adequate filtering on their apparently wildly-varying-in-quality sources.
The saddest fact about this whole thing is that while CR is now barely competing with TV broadcasts in quality, they could do a lot better. Just having similar quality to Japanese TV isn't enough when the western anime fanbase, in other words CR's entire audience, is used to watching filtered fansubs rather than raw unfiltered broadcasts. Maybe they wanted to one-up fansub/rip releases that stick to 720p for TV stuff. But you know what? They do that for a reason. TV broadcast quality just isn't that good, and anime mastering resolutions generally aren't high enough to make 1080p encodes from TV sources worthwhile. Considering that CR's 1080p offerings aren't really any better, it really is a shame. If they gave the bitrate of their current 1080p encodes to their 720p encodes, they could without a doubt beat the TV broadcasts in quality for pretty much all the cases. Sadly, since they're playing the number game of advertising (”bigger must always mean better, right?”), they can hardly back down from offering 1080p now. Gullible people will certainly eat that up, but what about the people who actually care about video quality and understand that there's more to it than just the resolution?

To read the full feedback, go here. But, if you do not. Then alright, just posting about this persons feedback about cr videos, is all.

While I can certainly agree with increasing the quality of CRs offerings, I feel it needs to take a backseat to user experience. The barely functional apps are a huge headache to deal with for a lot of people and the loss of convenience is far more damaging than negligible video quality differences to the average viewer.

In a perfect world we would see improvements in both.

CR streams what they receive from the anime studios. It is up to the anime studios to provide a quality video file. CR most likely does not have permission to alter the videos through the use of filters.

So is it more worthwhile to watch in 720p? i don't really understand all this jargon...

-HG

It all depends. If the 1080p looks better, than use that. If you don't see a difference, then stick to 720p.


I find that most anime is hard to differentiate between 720p and 1080p, especially since most anime is actually drawn at a lower resolution (like 540p) and then digitally upscaled by the anime studios to the higher HD resolutions. Animation scales a lot easier than live action which is why it is harder to notice a difference between 720p and 1080p.

Where it is important, and is what the OP was trying to explain, is that the bitrate is more important. You can have a high resolution video with a low bitrate that will look like complete crap compared to a low resolution video with a high bitrate. The resolution determines the size of the video (As in the dimensions of the picture, not the file size), where as the bitrate determines how much information is present in the video. The lower the bitrate, the less information and the less detail a video has.

The problem with high bitrates is that bandwidth becomes an issue. A lot of CR members use internet connections that are capped. CR has to find the best balance of quality and video size to make sure that every one is able to watch as many videos as they want without running into bandwidth and data cap limitations.

Even a company as large as Netflix has this problem. Netflix videos have problems with banding and loss of small details, like being able to see the small pebbles on a gravel road, or being able to see the rough surface on a stucco wall. They have this problem because Netflix uses a very high compression video codec. They purchased a company last year that created a new video compression codec that promises to improve picture quality by 30% but keeping the video size the same, or by keeping the same video quality and lowering the video size. Netflix is currently re-encoding their entire library in this new video codec. They were able to drastically lower the video size while still keeping the same picture quality (Although many people have pointed out examples where many videos are slightly "softer" looking compared to the old codec). Netflix is also rolling out "Super HD" where they have increased the bitrate for their 1080p videos to a much higher quality. In fact, Super HD is so high of a bitrate that ISPs must be connected to Netflix's own content distribution network to be able to stream the Super HD videos. Currently only a few ISPs are connected. (Sadly, Time Warner cable is not one of them)

I've noticed that in 1080 the picture sometimes looks better but my frame rate suffers compared to 720, ultimately 720 looks better. thanks for all your help, i'll make sure to let Raz know too.