Do you have a separate 4k library?

I honestly can’t tell the difference between 4K and 1080 unless I’m right up to the screen, so I only have a few choice favorites (that are heavy on the special effects) in 4K. It’s such a massive amount more space just for a slightly better picture.

For me only certain movies are worth the space on my server that a high quality 4k rip would take up. I do most everything in 1080 and specific films in 4k. Besides that most people aren't going to see a real difference unless you have a good home theater set up

Typically I only seek out 4K content if it's an "event" type of movie like a big budget blockbuster or something like that. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I typically don't have a problem watching my movie collection in HD when I grew up watching beta and VHS cassettes.

Nah. My older 1080p stuff remains, but I just do 4k only now. Media server is powerful enough to transcode to 1080 on the fly for any device that can't handle 4k, or for slower network conditions.

IMO the main reason to go for 4K is the HDR color accuracy.

Most movies are mastered in 1080p regardless, not to mention CGI effects are still mostly rendered at 2K.

But DCI-P3? If your screen can cover the color gamut or mostly cover it (90%+) then I'd go for it.

Personally I just have Radarr setup for 4K HDR and Sonarr setup for 1080p. Jellyfin transcodes 4K to 1080p and HDR to SDR just fine for my purposes (note that I have an Intel N100 box with QSV hardware transcoding and tonemapping setup)

No, I can't even tell the difference between 1080p and 4K from across the room on a normal sized TV, so I don't bother wasting the space for 4K. If I had a nice projector with a huge screen, I would probably go for the 4K videos though.

I've replaced all my media with 4K remuxes, when available, 1080p remuxes otherwise, unless it's a movie I'm only getting by request, then I might get an encode. Felt good to wash away all the 1080p and especially 720p stuff. 4K with HDR makes a HUGE difference. A lot of the time the picture has been remastered (maybe the for the first time, maybe more) and is exclusive to the UHD. Also, you often get upgraded with Dolby Atmos or DTS:X tracks, which rule.

Nop, I don't have a 4k library. To be honest, my TV doesn't even know what HD ready is. It can handle 1080i, but full HD, nop. (And I already have a hard time seeing the difference between 720p and 1080p)

I have two libraries for movies because my home theater can let 4k + HDR shine while my Internet connection doesn't have the upload to send that to family. They get stuck with 1080 and have never complained. My server has the power to transcode on the fly but for now I have the free space to keep both.

TV is almost entirely 1080 unless there is a super good reason to upgrade past that. I'm not actually sure if I've ever done that.

Set profiles for the quality of movies you're looking to download.

LOL meanwhile even if I have a 4k monitor I still choose 720p to save space and have quantity over quality

Yes - I have two separate instances of Radarr, each storing their movies in dedicated top-level folders ("Movies" and "Movies-4k").

Overseerr is used to manage requests, with all 1080p requests being automatically approved, and 4K requests requiring my approval (so I can be frugal with NAS space).

Plex merges both folders into a single Movies library, where I can play either resolution of a given movie (assuming both resolutions exist).

I would try the „retina formula“ to see, if the upgrade would benefit me.

Basically apples retina displays are engineered, that either the selected pixel density, pixel size and typical viewing distance, single pixels cannot be seen by the human eye. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_display?wprov=sfti1#Rationale

If you have a small tv and it is several meters away from you, my guess would be that the difference is not that big.

I keep multiple versions in the same library. I use Emby, and, as long as my naming is good, I get one listing for each movie, and the ability to select which version to watch.

I download 4K if I can get it. I delete after I've watched it.

If you're only watching on 1 TV, I don't think there's any reason to keep them a separate 4k library. And if your server can handle transcoding easily, there's still not much reason.

If you have an often-used second (or third, etc) TV with lower resolution and your server doesn't handle transcoding well, then it's probably worth keeping them separate.

I've also started to disagree with the guide about file size. I don't think I can tell the difference, and I'm not trying to preserve media for the future. So long as the video has the features I want, I think just about any file size is fine.

I keep both but in the same library.

Personally i get the highest quality i can. Often 4K REMUX . If a device is not capable of showing 4K i just transcode the stream at the server.

Yep. My Plex server can’t handle multiple 4K streams and neither can my ISPs bandwidth. So it’s 4K download simply for stuff we watch at home and the rest of Plex content is 1080p

Yes, I run two instances of Radarr and Sonarr. One caps out at 1080p, the other one only allows 2160p.

Jellyfin just has two separate libraries for them.

I'm mostly doing this to prevent unecessary transcoding away from home where streaming 4k HDR is unlikely. At some point I will merge them but bandwidth for 4k streaming is not there yet and proper HDR tone mapping is still rare.

1 library and movies are all 4K if newer than 2010. Otherwise it's 1080p just like TV series.

I think people who have separate libraries don't have access to hardware transcoding, or prefer not to use it. That's the only reason I can see for it. My library is fully mixed, if a connection or device cannot support the resolution or codec, my server will transcode it in real time. Is transcoding the best quality? No, but if it's transcoding because a device can't handle higher quality I'm unlikely to notice the difference between a 1080p file and a live transcode of a 2160p file. We don't have a ton of TVs in the house and the main event TV is high enough quality that I'm now downloading most things in UHD.

This is the perspective of someone with a dedicated 24/7 media server with plenty of storage that is easily expanded.

when 4K is done well I can't tell the difference from 1080p. but it's usually not compressed well, at least in my experience, the pixel density just makes the image dimmer

I tried but it was way too much of a pain, especially when Plex does transcode just fine (w/ Intel 11th gen QSV). Except for DV of course, so I have to make sure I get the HDR version.