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One such member, ripper_jones , describes the first time he saw a Citadel encode of Blade Runner 2049 : "I had the original 4K Blu-ray remux. 65 gigabytes. The Citadel version was 12 gigabytes. I put them side-by-side on a calibrated OLED. I flipped input for two hours. I couldn't tell which was which. Then I realized—the Citadel file had more shadow detail in the opening desert scene. The remux had crushed blacks. The encode had saved them."
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Critics from the hardware encoding camp argue that Citadel is an anachronism. "Why spend a week encoding a movie when an NVENC or Apple Silicon encode at 25 Mbps looks 'good enough' to 99% of people?" asks a streaming engineer who requested anonymity. "The Citadel people are chasing ghosts. They’re like audiophiles who claim they can hear the difference between lossless and 320kbps MP3 on earbuds in a subway." citadel h265