The situation with SD (~360p) or 480p is a bit weird as there are no decent rips any more, the white-one-line group has disappeared and dioguitar reigns supreme. Which is very strange. It would take absolute minimal work to d/l FHD from a better rip groups, re-encode to 480p, then upload it to a paid host. Bam watch the revenue (from paid host) tinkle into your pants pocket. Why the only one doing this work is the much hated dioguitar?
Anyway I don't bother with SD anyway. FHD scene is great (again). My own fav thzla stopped uploading new vids on Aug 21. This had happened before, I think at the end of Chinese New Year holiday (school). So this time, suspending uploads 10-ish days before start of school year, no worries right. I kept checking every other day (just in case), and use both 168x and Sukebei for temporary relief. Then thz.la website even died, again it happened before. But it looked worrying. A few (long) days later it came back under a new domain name BUT still no uploads. Finally school starts and new vids were added again... finally finally after 2 weeks. From Sep 3 to now, about 375 vids have been added in 4 days. I haven't checked but it seems thz.la is catching up with those 14-ish days of suspension.
So for those 2 weeks I could not rely on my established habit (use my own app to scrap thzla) and here's my view of the scene:
1. SD/480p, already mentioned. I am especially annoyed they (loosely speaking they) often upload a thumbnail generated from watermark-free FHD version because there are leechers who checks thumbnails for watermark. But it's nearly futile, it's easy to notice the torrent says 1.4GB but the thumbnail says 7.1GB. Stay away from those. I got a couple of dioguitar over past 9-ish month and ended up deleting them and instead get a FHD and perform downsample.
2. thzla, still my personal fav, FHD at reasonable filesize (typical 4200kbps), easy to get and archive and easy on my LAN and playback hardware. Good (not great) seeds. Release pace is good but never zeroth or first day. Their selection include many yuck vids esp. grandma porn and once in a while scat. But nevermind those, they pretty much provide 100% coverage of my want vids (which admitted is very narrow). Only a few vids (1-ish? maybe even fewer than that) per year I had to look to other groups.
3. 168x/77xx at first seems attractive to me since their website design is extremely similar to thzla. A nasty yellow (77xx) watermark that disappear after 5 sec, awesome. Their release pace is near-first day, another plus. But their rips are typical 6500 kbps. Slightly too big and playback poorly on my bedroom set-top box. I could be wrong... but the bloated file size and poor playback maybe one thing: 60 fps nope it's not frame rate I don't know what the issue is). And they seem to miss a lot of top studio vids. What the...
4. 44x seems to me perfectly free of watermark aweawesome. Don't know if they have a website, so I use sukebei to find them. Caps at 6000 kbps, playback fine on my bedroom set-top, perhaps only spending extra split second to buffer. Very excellent alternative to thzla and a lifesaver when thzla went on holiday (would my nuts explode for a whole week without porn? never want to find out). Maybe I should do a side-by-side with thzla for the finer comparison (someone mentioned color saturation or something). Thzla rips may not be gorgeous but it's plenty good enough for my use. To deal with the 50% larger size of 44x I archive the FHD version on HDD or BD and re-encode to 720p at about 2600 kbps (it's plenty fine for fapping) on the NAS, re-encode takes only 1 hour on my performance PC (but once it takes 8 hours on a 1.8GHz Celeron). 720p is very easy on my bedroom set-up, random seek is super-responsive. (random seek is essential when watch with a partner). I try to minimize re-encode/down-sample, it's not a good use of my time. But sometimes it's a quick (ironic) fix solution.
