There is no HD via BitTorrent

I know what you are thinking, BitTorrent will carry any bits you want. That is not what I am talking about, I am talking about all the people who responded to my "How to: get tons of HD content playing on your PC" with the suggestion to use BitTorrent! This has annoyed me ever since and I am here to set the record straight. This is going to be old news to most of you, but for those who don't know here we go.

As we have discussed recently HD material is arguably at least 1280x720, but preferably 1920x1080p ( I threw that P in there to fend off any 720p vs 1080i debates). Anything less just isn't HD, especially if it's 480 and under like DVDs. There are sites on the Internet that hosts torrent files with video that have HDTV in the title and I think this causes some confusion. This simply means that the SOURCE video was HDTV, this of course was before the video was re-compressed. The people that post these files are very skilled in regards to video compression and although the files look better than anything you are watching on SD cable they are still NOT HD. The few I have sampled are 624x352 which is not even DVD quality much less HD quality. 1920x1080p is 2.1 mega pixels these files are 0.2 mega pixels, that is 10 times smaller! The original HD file was ~6GB and the file downloaded was 350MB. Granted they look much better than anything anyone who doesn't have HD has ever seen, but to call them HD or even discuss them during a HD content article would be crazy.

For all of the people surprised by this, go out and find yourself some real HD material and maybe you will finally understand what all the HD fuss is about.