Help & Frequently Asked Questions

What is Digital Foundry?

Founded in 2004, Digital Foundry specialises in covering the technology behind games – from console platforms to PC and beyond. Through video analysis and in-depth articles, we touch on everything from graphics comparisons, hardware reviews, PC benchmarking, plus interviews with the developers behind the games themselves.

What is the Digital Foundry subscription?

Simply put? The subscription is a way for us to provide higher-quality content directly to you. If you like what we do in our written articles and videos, you can pay $5 per month to support our work. In exchange, you get access to high quality versions of every video we produce - higher-bitrate 1080p and 4K source files. On top of that, you gain early access to our DF Direct Weekly show, exclusive extras – and early downloads from DF Retro.

What's wrong with YouTube?

YouTube is a great way to watch all of our video output but it has certain limits. We encode each video to the highest standard possible, but YouTube's limited bandwidth is prone to reducing their quality after the upload. The result is more macro-blocking artefacts and a loss in detail. This can be an issue at 1080p resolution, but far more so when we export videos at 4K. The solution? DF Supporters get a direct link to source h.264 and h.265 files on our server – meaning you retain the image quality that we originally intended.

How are your downloads improved?

We use a video encoding technique based on the idea of a constant quality level. Typically, the more complex the image, and the more motion there is, the more bandwidth is used. It ensures a consistent level of image quality throughout and keeps file-size bloat down. We'll be using the h.264 or h.265 codec with data stored in an MP4 container. As a rough ballpark figure, a 4K 60fps h.264 video file tends to be around 500MB per minute of footage. 1080p will be much lower!

How can I play your videos?

Our standard 1080p60 videos should work just fine on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer without too much effort, using the media player of your choice. However, 4K video - especially at 60fps – may require a more modern machine. For 4K TV owners, we recommend copying our videos onto a USB 3.0 flash drive and running them directly on your TV.

Are the videos protected by DRM?

Our video files are entirely DRM free.

Are there any adverts in the videos?

No ads. Our source files remove the adverts you might see for a YouTube version of a video, in rare cases where ads appear as part of an ongoing promotion.

What content and benefits does each Patreon tier receive?

Our $5 tier exists to provide high quality versions of YouTube content, early access to DF Direct Weekly show (including an exclusive RSS podcast feed), the ability to submit questions for the Q+A part of the show, plus there’s entry to our brilliant Discord community server. On top of that, there are weekly updates after the DF staff meeting, posted every Monday.

DF Premium Support costs $10 per month and offers all of the above in combination with early access to forthcoming DF videos, bonus material and behind-the-scenes content, in addition to premium-only channels on the Discord server.

The DF Retro Tier at $15 per month gives you all of the above, plus early access to every new episode of DF Retro – typically there’s around a month wait until those episodes go public. It’s the same thing with new episodes of DF Retro Play. The Retro tier also delivers Patreon-exclusive shows, including Retro Q+A and Retro Pick-Ups.