Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.
In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.
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I still pay them every month because they have the goods but it's so frustrating that the people with the most film-buff oriented catalog and their hearts (presumably) in the right place have so little ability to deliver on UX.
(I used to subscribe to MUBI as well, which is stronger for new indie films, but didn't have time for both, and MUBI app was so bad it could have been a fork of the Criterion app.)
And there are one or two movies that have leaked in DCP 4K, which look absolutely stunning if you have the hardware to play them.
Can you give me some examples of those guerilla remaster ? I know of the various Star Wars projects (Harmy and the likes) and the remaster from "La Classe Américaine", but I don't know any others.
A French movie that bungle together several excerpt from classic Warner movie to tell its own humorous story. A cult classic for French millennials. The director later on went on to make The Artist to universal acclaim.
However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).
In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).
The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.
I believe the first project of this type for Star Wars was Harmy's Despecialized Edition but I think these days most people prefer the 4K77 versions, although it varies by film and by person.
Nobody will figure it out!
There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work.
Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work.
Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.
But truth of the matter is that many times you don't have access to a higher quality source. Sometimes you only have something that's been re-encoded over and over or something that has degraded through the passage of time. I would not suggest overwriting the source, but the truth is that many people will find this a better viewing experience. Truth is that many of those remasters will use similar technologies, though with much more thought and care than your one click and it's done act like it is magic programs. Truth is that people do enjoy it in videogames and existing streaming and movie systems. People do prefer better native high resolution, but when that is just unavailable, what are you left with? But the truth is that most people are happy with lossy encodings and lower bit color schemes (most people don't even have a 10 bit monitor and (real) HDR isn't prolific).
If it is a choice between shitty quality and AI upscale, I'll choose AI upscale more times than not (but not 100%). But instead, if it is a choice between shitty quality, AI upscale, and high quality native, I'm choosing high quality naive 100% of the time. It's not even a question! But the point is that there are choices and not all of them require deep knowledge. I'm not arguing replace native with upscale, that's idiotic. But for an at home player where more people are going to have to make choices about storage spaces and won't care if it is lossy, then the option exists.
We're also talking about streaming services. Streaming services force the AI upscaling on you. Hell, even in some TV's it is hard or impossible to turn off (mine turns itself back on!). Let's let people decide, because we know that the incentives are too strong on the streaming service for them to hand you raw.
