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TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

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Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#11

Post by dfc »

spindritf wrote: post #6
wmf wrote: post #4

Finally, pirates are using ISO standards instead of gross hacks like DivX. RAR is still lame and using the tag "HDTV" to refer to SD downsamples of HD sources is still misleading, though.

HDTV indicates source, not release quality. It's the same with bluray. The naming standards (and everything else for that matter) are highly regulated which is an impressive example of order by consensus since no one can give out orders. RARs are an artefact of FTP transfers during which files would get corrupted, and not-so-fast connections of the past which made re-downloading the whole release somewhat inconvenien…

I thought that rar was used so that the capper could split the archive across multiple files and begin uploading the content before the show was over.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#12

Post by thadeus_venture »

What makes it beneficial for ripping/distribution groups to coordinate like this? I've previously seen them agree on a common standard for the number and size of rar files a release is to be broken up into, and other things i can't remember the specifics of. Why do they do it?

PS: About time with dropping xvid for h264.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#14

Post by tvon »

dfc wrote: post #11
spindritf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDTV indicates source, not release quality. It's the same with bluray. The naming standards (and everything else for that matter) are highly regulated which is an impressive example of order by consensus since no one can give out orders. RARs are an artefact of FTP transfers during which files would get corrupted, and not-so-fast connections of the past which made re-downloading the whole release somewhat inconvenien…

I thought that rar was used so that the capper could split the archive across multiple files and begin uploading the content before the show was over.

I believe it's for non-torrent sharing methods such as NNTP (since you can't, I guess, upload hundreds of megabytes of data to a newsgroup in a single post).

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#15

Post by spindritf »

dfc wrote: post #11
spindritf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDTV indicates source, not release quality. It's the same with bluray. The naming standards (and everything else for that matter) are highly regulated which is an impressive example of order by consensus since no one can give out orders. RARs are an artefact of FTP transfers during which files would get corrupted, and not-so-fast connections of the past which made re-downloading the whole release somewhat inconvenien…

I thought that rar was used so that the capper could split the archive across multiple files and begin uploading the content before the show was over.

It seems problematic to set up and could cause nukes for incomplete releases with the slightest mistake or network failure on the capper's part (with the accompanying displeasure of sites' admins). And he would have to do everything on his own -- the capping, the encoding, the packaging. Also, I don't know how hard the tv groups are pushing for early release but usually the content is uploaded to the group's server and only then pushed to affiliated top sites at the same time.

Obviously, it's all hearsay so you may be right.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#17

Post by gnu8 »

wmf wrote: post #9
aw3c2 wrote: post #5

About time! But requiring mp4 as container is a bad idea in my opinion. To playback an mp4 file you need to have it wholly (please correct me if I am wrong) so you cannot start watching before you downloaded it all. MKV would be so much better. Please do not blindly reply with "But my XYZ device does not support MKV". Scene rules/standards have a lot of impact and might help making vendors support Matroska.

If the MP4 is "fast start" the index is at the beginning so you can "stream" it. I suspect scene standardization on MKV would probably encourage Apple and Sony to deliberately not support MKV (instead of not supporting it out of laziness, as they currently are).

I'm pretty sure it's already deliberate.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#18

Post by pjscott »

GvS wrote: post #3

They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles ) since almost a year.

For the longest time, xvid was the standard for these guys. They still have standards requiring that all releases be packaged into multipart RAR files, "in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB". In other words, they are kind of inflexible and hidebound.

Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it.

There's probably a broader lesson in all this.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#19

Post by mdda »

Personally, I find it fascinating that this band of merry pirates is so organized, so rules-based. Out of a purely anarchic environment, they've managed to accept this kind of self-discipline. If only web-standards committees had that sort of power...

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#20

Post by CoolGuySteve »

GvS wrote: post #3

They are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles ) since almost a year.

A lot of devices don't support High Profile, let alone Hi10P. Frankly, getting video in Hi10P sounds more annoying than 'innovative'.
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