@drekkin said in Why do new upscaled posts immediately get hit with a 1-star rating?:
ut I suppose it's a case of someone reading somewhere that HEVC is the next greatest thing and them deciding that everything ever made needs to be re-encoded with this amazing new technology.
That's pretty much what's happening and the reason is simple, it's double the efficiency of H264, meaning you require half the bitrate to get the same image quality. The issue is that people are taking lossy copies and compressing them even further, like you said yourself. Regardless of how much your HD can store or how fast your internet is, compression will always make itself more and more important through time as the demand for content it's availability grows out of control and even H265 is getting outdated nowadays.
But encoding, just like AI upscaling, is designed to have a range of scenarios where it'll perform well and everything else have to be taken as is. This is precisely why it's more important to preserve the source material.
But there are cases like mentioned by another user, where the source material is long gone and you're left with digital "enhanced" versions from 30 years ago... In this case using todays AI is much more a case of restoration than enhancement, I'd say.
