How much do you care about porn video quality? Would you veto a video because it doesn’t have enough pixels? Would you skip over a cam stream because the sound was too fuzzy or avoid audio porn if the mic didn’t have a pop guard? My boyfriend gives a massive shit about the quality of particular videos which is not, in itself, a problem… until we watch porn together.
I asked Twitter the other day how much people generally cared about porn video quality (and, in the case of audio porn, sound quality). The results, pleasingly, were broadly on my side, so I can print these out and tape them to the fridge as part of the ongoing war in Which Of Us Is Right…
Additional question: when you listen to #AudioPorn, do you care about the sound quality?
— Girl on the Net (@girlonthenet) June 22, 2020
I’m joking about being ‘right’, by the way – your kink is not my kink but your kink is OK, even if your kink requires every fantasy scene to be shot in extremely high-definition. I do have a theory, though, that those who care most about porn video quality are those who find that videos portraying their own kinks and tastes are generally fairly easy to find. If you have a super-niche fetish, you’re probably more likely to accept fuzzy video or poor sound quality, because you’re just so delighted that someone’s made something that fits your kink in the first place. As people pointed out in the comments to that tweet, some things are more important in porn than video quality – whether it’s ethically produced, for instance, or whether the people involved have genuine chemistry. Others told me (understandably) that it’s entirely reasonable to care about video quality when you’re enjoying a visual medium.
The only problem comes when you’re watching it with someone who has wildly different ideas about what counts as ‘acceptable’ quality.
“Is that a green screen?”
To me, porn has always been something to enjoy outside solo masturbation. I very rarely sit down on my own, unzip my jeans, and get stuck into a scene, and not just because that feels a little like a busman’s holiday (though it does). Mostly for me, porn is something to do with someone else. It plays a part in my sex life mostly because I can’t spit the contents of my head out onto a TV screen.
The same is not true of my other half.
He likes videos. Not only does he like videos, he cares a LOT about the quality. Which is fine if we’re subscribing to a relatively new studio where all their porn is shot in incredible quality, less so if it’s a cam site with varied output or a studio with an archive that goes way back into the past. Occasionally I’ll just be getting into the set up to a scene, enjoying the tone and excited about where this is going, when he tuts and clicks on the next one, declaring ‘not enough pixels, sorry.’ As if what matters most is the pixels! It’s not just the image quality either, he gets frustrated if the sound is slightly out of sync, so the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ come a half-second before or after the performer’s mouth makes the shape of them. If he’s going to enjoy something, he needs the porn video quality to be good enough that he can relax into what’s happening and not nitpick about the scenery.
Recently we almost got into a genuine argument because the couple we were watching on Chaturbate had a weird lighting set-up in their living room. He thought that part of it was green screened, and the back wall of their room was actually a digital one, designed to blank out the clutter of their everyday lives and keep a bit of privacy between them and their eager viewers. I thought this would have been a clever trick, but it didn’t look like green screen to me, just a slightly odd-coloured LED striplight that had thrown off the balance in the room.
Can you see why I don’t usually tell you about the bits beyond the sexy blogs?
Anyway. I didn’t really care if it was green screen or not. The couple we were watching were exceptional: brilliantly playful, incredibly hot, and possibly the best performers I have ever seen on that site. One day I’ll write you a post about the skill with which one of them put in a butt plug – it left me gaping in awe and possibly drooling down my chin. Who gives a single, solitary fuck about the backdrop to their shagging?
My partner, it turns out.
He literally couldn’t let it go. Even during the butt plug mastery!
Him: Seriously, I reckon that’s green screen.
Me: Hmm? OK. I don’t think so but I’m not bothered.
*five minutes later*
Him: Look at the light over there by the sofa, it looks off.
Me: Right. It’s a bit offputting when you keep talking about it, though. Any chance you could ignore it just while we’re having fun?
*five minutes later*
Him: The edges around her hair there – don’t they look too sharp?
Me: Sssh…
Him: Either that’s a green screen or their lighting’s really fuc…
Me: WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT THE GREEN SCREEN DARLING. Two people are literally fucking their hearts out for our entertainment right now.
I shouldn’t be mean about it – there’s no rational reason why ‘bad picture quality’ shouldn’t be a reason he gets to veto something, just as ‘creepy-gross copywriting in scene descriptions’ gets to be one of mine. I think I’m just a little more grumpy about it because I have spent so much of my adult life having to reframe porn scenarios in my head to try and make them ‘fit’ what I want, I feel he should be at least willing to make a little imaginatory effort when it comes to picture quality. I’ve sat through long scenes with straight men, in which the camera is zoomed in tight on the body of a naked woman, and while he drinks in the sight of her jiggling tits and kickass tattoos and face contorted into grimaces of pleasure and satisfaction, my own sexuality is catered to by a faceless, disembodied cock slamming in from the side of the screen. I’m used to painting in the edges of a scene, or writing in details when we’re watching porn without a plot. If I can paint in the bodies, faces, gestures and actions of the man in a straight porn scene, surely you can get past a fuzzy picture or the odd green screen… right?
Hence my theory: you’re more likely to care about porn video quality if your fantasies themselves are catered to with a lot of content. If you’re a straight dude who is into anal, gang bangs, kink, etcetera, you already have a veritable buffet of porn ready and waiting for you to open your wallet and enjoy. If you’re into scenes where five people fill their socks with custard and fling them at each other while giggling, you’re probably so delighted to have someone cater to your kink that the number of pixels will never be as relevant as the quantity of custard.
What’s more, although I find my partner’s obsession with porn video quality annoying sometimes, I’m far more likely to pity him than berate him. In order to get off, he needs to have an external source spoon-feed him fantasies over which to beat one out. He rarely ever gets to lie in the dark like I do, eyes closed and imagination firing on all cylinders, enjoying a pic n mix buffet of filth that caters to every whim he could ever have.
When I write my own porn, it’s perfect
A couple of nights after our green screen discussion, I was lying on the floor of the living room listening to some podcasts, lazily dreaming while he played video games. My podcast came to an end so I started doing what I often do when I find I’ve got headspace to spare: planning my next wank. I’ve a few characters and scenarios that I switch in and out of my fantasies, but if I ever get a horny and peaceful few minutes I’ll often try some new ones on for size. Taking this threesome and changing the main characters from businessmen to army officers, or that gang bang and switching it from a bunch of dudes in the back room of a porn cinema to a bachelor party. Perhaps I want a character from one fantasy to meet two characters from another, or I just want the same thing again, but bent over a desk this time instead of a sofa (trust me: it makes a difference).
After about twenty minutes of solid planning – dreamily flicking back-and-forth between characters, scenarios, and the sexy lines around which the dialogue would be built – I felt I had a decent idea of the newly-polished mental porn that would get me off before sleep.
I took out my headphones, peeled myself off the floor, and went over to say goodnight before running upstairs to bed.
Me: Night!
Him: Oh! It’s early. Night though.
*I bend down to kiss him*
Him: You look pretty pleased with yourself. Why are you giggling?
Me: Not giggling, just smiling. I’ve made a new wank fantasy and I’m off to give it a test drive.
And I know that what’s in my head is never going to match in terms of quality: there is no HD video, no intense close-ups, none of the character or fun that comes from having other people interpret and play out fantasies. The people in my head please me because they will never surprise me, but the people in actual porn can do all these things: bringing new takes, lines, characters, positions and joy to scenes which look very samey when created by a single person. But still. It’s what works best for me – the dreamlike, fuzzy, exactly-to-my-kinks scenes which play in my head will always beat video – no matter how beautifully those videos are shot. I suspect he finds it upsetting for me, that my kinks will rarely be portrayed on screen exactly how I’d like them to be. That the best I’ll get is a dreamlike scene, lacking in detail or surprise, following a well-worn script that I had to go to all the trouble of actually writing myself.
While it seems odd to file ‘media quality’ in the same bucket as ‘kink’, I think that’s where I end up. It’s not quite the same as having truly different fantasies, but it is the same when it comes to being accepting of someone else’s quirks. It’s not so much a matter of Which Of Us Is Right, as which of each others’ kinks and quirks we are happy to live with in the long run.
17 Comments
Had to laugh at the green screen thing! :D
Regarding video quality, I guess I care and I don’t. I have a bit of a collection of lesbian porn, dating back to the 90s, and the video quality is what you’d expect for something that old. There are definitely things that will make me overlook crap video quality – the story, the passion, the scenario, and even just a forgiving attitude to the fact this stuff is really old and I shouldn’t expect much.
I do have a preference for high-def smut. I don’t really give a hoot about 4K porn. I’ve seen some and it doesn’t really add a whole heap of anything to a scene. HD is good enough. Even 720p at a high enough bitrate is perfectly adequate.
I watch a lot of artsy masturbation videos particularly those from The Life Erotic. I love the variety of themes and settings, as well as the level of cinematography they put into a lot of their videos. That stuff just doesn’t feel right in anything but high-def. Even their older HD movies, which are using lower bitrates, tend to look “off” to me and yeah, it does have a bit of an effect on how much I can get into the scene.
I do get the mind’s eye trumping video quality, though. Sometimes, even with a super hot scene, it’s my own re-writing in my head that gets me over the edge and at that point, it doesn’t matter how many pixels are on the screen.
I’m not sure I’ve watched any 4K porn, but I might have to ask my partner. I am so bad at understanding this kind of tech that I generally just make the distinction between high and low, where ‘high’ equals ‘something someone who cares about vid quality would like’ and ‘low’ being ‘everything else’ so I may have spectacularly failed at defining my terms for this discussion =) I did recently watch some VR porn that appeared to be one level of quality above what I had previously watched, and found myself – for possibly the first time in my life – going ‘ohhh OK I get why this might make a difference.’
Also *bookmarks The Life Erotic* … =)
I have limited experience with VR porn. That guest blog notwithstanding, there is very little G/G VR porn out there *sad face* and as I’m not usually into the generic porno guys, there is little female-POV B/G porn that appeals to me.
But I do know a bit about the technical stuff. VR porn gets better with higher resolutions, a high bitrate and a high frame rate. If any of those three things are on the low side, it’s gonna look crap. A 1080p equivalent on a VR video won’t cut it. It’s like if you placed your nose to a typical Full HD TV set. The picture would look shit because it’s close enough for your eyes to start breaking the image up into clumps of pixels, rather than a fully-shaped object. So the more pixels you can get in front of your eyes, the more “real” the image is going to be.
Frame rate is important because your eyes expect to see fluid motion and if they’re not seeing that, it puts a strain on them that induces headaches, nausea or other undesirable effects.
4K porn can be a bit of a mixed bag. There is a fair amount of it available now, but some of it looks no better or even worse than 1080p because it has been encoded in a lower-than-ideal bitrate. It’s not just the number of pixels on the screen that counts – it’s how much information (bits) are in each second of video. Lower bitrates result in blurry images, higher bitrates result in more detail and sharpness.
A lot of producers just wanted to jump on the 4K bandwagon so produce 4K videos but then compress the shit out of it into lower bitrates because they want to conserve bandwidth. A real-world example is 1080p video on YouTube vs a Blu-Ray. Even if the Blu-Ray was the source for the YouTube upload, YT compresses stuff into lower bitrates so Blu-Ray will always look better.
And I’ll never stop singing the praises of The Life Erotic. So many lovely jilling off videos to jill off too! I particularly like some of the more bizarre ones they do.
While I’m not that bothered about sound quality per se, I absolutely agree with your partner about out of sync sound. I find it particularly distracting if I’m watching a spanking video – I can find myself getting distracted then about whether the nice slapping sound is the sound that should match with the previous or subsequent smack.
Ohhhh do you know what? I am 100% with you on sound for spanking etc, and I am annoyed with myself that this hadn’t occurred to me before I wrote this post – yes, out of sync smacks are definitely a turn-off. I owe my partner an apology because I think I assume he’s usually focusing on the voice sync, but spanks/body-slapping-against-body… yeah I can totally see how that is a proper frustration if it is slightly off. Thanks!
Totally understand the “mental energy on keeping sofas still” point.
I often have to pause a pleasing mental narrative to consider, “But WHAT brought her to that seemingly deserted field? Was it a short cut to the pub? No, that’s wrong…. Her old route home from work? OK, that works… Resume!”
Haha I am SO GLAD this isn’t just me. My key struggle is that if people are fucking against a sofa, my brain INSTANTLY goes ‘well that sofa would shift across the floor’ and it takes a lot of fairly intense, almost *meditative* energy to keep them fucking where they are rather than have the sofa accidentally sliding all over the floor. I frequently position desks etc right up against a wall in the fantasy to make it harder for them to do this, but often I need them to be in the middle of the room so the person getting fucked over the desk can grip the far edge with their hands. Then my brain does the ‘moving furniture’ thing again. I wonder if this is a problem hypnotherapists would be able to solve?
Now I feel mean saying I’m glad it’s not just me, because on reflection your brain’s interference requiring plot justification for routes characters take may be even more frustrating. What are brains? Why are brains? The human mind is a fascinating, and brilliant, and irritating thing.
Don’t feel mean! It’s similar “reality invasion” I think.
There’s a small part of my brain saying, “this isn’t the point, can we get to the hot stuff already!?” But nope, not that simple… anyway, when I get there, it’s worth the journey :-)
I like to make my fantasies as realistic as possible, right down to details like if the furniture would work that way, or if the reasons for the two (or more) people being there are feasible. I will rewrite bits of my fantasy as I go along if I come across something that doesn’t seem like it could happen, which can hold up proceedings…
The reason I do all that is because if my fantasy could *actually* happen, then it is so much hotter. Believing that the ridiculously hot thing I am imagining may actually happen in the future makes the fantasy seem even more realistic, which in turn makes it hotter.
The above means that all my fantasies are about my play partners. I sometimes tell them about my fantasies, but sometimes I keep them to myself. I figure that if I tell a play partner my exact fantasy then they might want to make it happen, which then will leave me feeling like they are only doing it to please me, not because they wanted to do that thing themselves. And if they don’t make the fantasy happen then I might be left feeling disappointed, or worrying that they didn’t find my idea very hot. I figure that if I don’t tell them and then they do it (or something similar) anyway by coincidence, I can just enjoy it for the spontaneous act it is, rather than tying myself up in knots worrying that they’re only doing something to please me… This is all making me sound like a nightmare to play with – I’m actually very easygoing and easy to please, and have partners who are very much on the same wavelength as me. It’s just that I overthink everything!
I don’t think it makes you sound like a nightmare =) I totally get it, and also I think it’s really lovely (and hopefully flattering for your play partners!) that your fantasies feature them and run along ‘could happen in the real world’ lines. As a fantasy style, it definitely stands out, and is a really cool thing I reckon. Like, I have not heard anyone who says similar things before, and I am super fascinated by the need for details to line up and be right!
Another fun read. I’m more like your partner I guess, though not quite as anal as him! It seems to me that if you’re spending more time looking at the pixels and the greenscreen than what’s going on in the video, that video is not doing its job for you. :)
For me, (video) porn is in considerable part a visual experience (though obviously sound and words are important too), and so the quality of it matters. I don’t need it in the highest def possible (I’ve tried watching 4K videos, and even on my large monitor I don’t see much difference). But I do value the realism and immersion that comes with HD.
The sad thing is, as with many things, there’s a ‘shifting baseline’ effect here. As video quality gradually rises, our standards of what we’ll put up with rise as well. I’ve been collecting porn on my hard drive for some time now, but when I went back not long ago to watch videos I downloaded in the early 2010s (though quite possibly recorded in the mid-90s) I found myself going, ‘this is so low quality! How did I ever jack off to this?’. In my memory, those videos were higher quality, because they seemed fine at the time; but watching them now, compared with modern stuff, I just can’t enjoy them any more.
I’m not so sure about your ‘theory’, though. My porn interests are not quite as niche as the custard thing, but definitely on the more unusual end of the spectrum; yet picture quality is still important to me. There may be only a relatively small number of sites that cater to the cross-section of my preferred fetish + my required picture quality, but that just means I love the ones that exist all the more.
Oooh yeah really good point re: shifting baseline. I don’t think I have much ‘old’ porn although I know my dude has saved a few classics from over the years for nostalgia wanks. Might have to go through a few and see if even I, in my ‘not caring about quality’ find it tricky with porn that’s a few generations behind. I definitely find this with video games – played an old edition of Monkey Island a few years ago and was like ‘wait… I remember this being SO well rendered at the time!’
And dammit, clearly my theory is not universal. I will have to go back to the drawing board =)
There was a study done to determine the most preferred screen size. It turned out that the content was the determining factor. Not the image or sound quality of the content, but if you really wanted to see the content. If you really liked the content a three inch screen would hold your attention. Also, beyond a certain largeness of screen YOU will have to back up AND AS YOU DO THE IMAGE WILL APPEAR SHARPER. This is due to the ‘circle of confusion’ which is the point where two side by side dots appear as one.
My iPad has a screen on 9.5 inches diagonal. I wear my work glasses which not only correct but magnify as I work close. I’m sitting about a foot from the iPad and it has that Apple Retina Screen. I watched a real hig def with lots of pixels ‘porn movie’ and I could see the weave in her clothes. She had a very good professional make up job so as to hide any blackheads on her nose. There is such a thing as too good!
I noticed a new catagory on the porn site. ‘REAL’. Some pretty funky stuff, but sometimes interesting and unique! Sort of like you DID get to peek through the nail hole into the dim bathroom where forbidden and illegal acts were going down.
Great text. Speaks also to a non-porn user and makes me laugh
I watch a lot of porn, both for recreation and to write scene reviews, and there’s an awful lot of variation in quality there – obviously, the best stuff comes from DVDs I own or HD DVD rips I buy online. However, a lot of what I’m interested in isn’t available on either, and some of my stuff comes from VHS, or rips from VHS (or even from broadcast TV via VHS and then encoding!), and there’s a noticeable dip in the quality there.
Back in the days of downloading, when everyone got their individual scenes from KaZaA, I used to maximise every video and then sit as far back from the screen as possible (a tip I originally got from watching Knightmare, but works well for porn too!). Quality didn’t bother me that much way back when.
In my advanced years, I’ve become more discerning. I think my turning point comes when rarity is involved – if it’s widely available in a number of formats, I’ll try and find the best one I can get; if it’s incredibly rare and only available in a gritty format (Black Venus leaps to mind, as does Serpent’s Lair, which I bought on VHS and still own!), then I’ll go for that. In fact, a lot of my very favourite porn is in SD; as long as I can discern it, it’s not a massive thing for me. I’m more annoyed, to be honest, with watermarks than anything else!
I do have one non-negotiable, though: I absolutely cannot stick with out-of-sync sound. I’ve deleted entire swathes of porn because of that.
I care about video quality, and only purchase videos in HD. I want to be able to see the woman and the action. Certain things cannot be seen well or at all in SD. There is a moment of Supergirl drooling for the villain’s cock in shame. The drool would have been difficult to impossible to see in SD. It was a hot moment of a woman’s mouth watering for a cock.
“The drool would have been difficult to impossible to see in SD. It was a hot moment of a woman’s mouth watering for a cock.”
WOW. Yep, I totally get what you’re saying here, that does sound astonishingly hot, and also like something that’d be tricky to capture or fully appreciate in a lower quality vid!