Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

scenerules.irc.gs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#31

Post by yxhuvud »

jomohke wrote: post #25
pjscott wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enc…

I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#32

Post by spindritf »

dfc wrote: post #26
spindritf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Respectfully I think I am right: "I don't know how hard the tv groups are pushing for early release" Why do you think they are called racers? "Early release" as you call it is the reason for the season... "He would have to do everything on his own -- the capping, the encoding, the packaging." This does not make any sense to me. Who would have to X?

> Why do you think they are called racers?

They're not. Cappers and racers are different people. It used to be that racers weren't even affiliated with the release group, just people moving stuff between sites for upload credit.

> Who would have to X?

The same person would have to do all the work involved in making a release. Usually, there's a division of labour: different person provides the source, someone else encodes it, someone else takes care of coordinating the release and so on.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#33

Post by tomku »

jomohke wrote: post #25
pjscott wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enc…

I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

Internal scene transfer was (and still is, afaik) done using FTP servers, often very primitive ones because they had to evade detection on hacked servers. When you're racing a large game or movie from one server to another, the last thing you want is for a random disconnect to ruin it 90% of the way through, or even worse, to finish it and find that the CRCs don't match because of random corruption. It also means that you can race from multiple sources for higher speed, and like you said, use a server as a source before it's actually done downloading.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#34

Post by pjscott »

tomku wrote: post #24
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.

Anime groups can afford to be much more aggressive about technology because they have special requirements that older tech doesn't allow (styled softsubs, multiple audio/sub tracks, ordered chapters), and because their audience is overwhelming using high-performance PCs because nothing else commonly supports those technologies. In fact, modern anime releases are basically targeted towards one platform (Windows PC wit…

This is a fairly recent development, but VLC 2.0 will play just about anything out there, on any of the big three operating systems.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#35

Post by newman314 »

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.

One upside of using mp4 is that most smartphone devices and tablets support it.

No more transcoding from xvid/divx.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#36

Post by dfc »

tvon wrote: post #14
dfc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Everything about the scene is for non-torrent sharing (atleast public / largescale distribution). The scene groups hate public torrent sites/users.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#37

Post by krakensden »

yxhuvud wrote: post #31
jomohke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.

This is the upstream of the public bittorrent releases- and they still do lots of strange, unfashionably archaic stuff.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#38

Post by efraim »

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.

The archives has to be assembled into one file with at least two encoding passes, is that even possible if you don't have the entire show captured?

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#39

Post by dfc »

tomku wrote: post #33
jomohke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

Internal scene transfer was (and still is, afaik) done using FTP servers, often very primitive ones because they had to evade detection on hacked servers. When you're racing a large game or movie from one server to another, the last thing you want is for a random disconnect to ruin it 90% of the way through, or even worse, to finish it and find that the CRCs don't match because of random corruption. It also means tha…

FXP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#40

Post by dfc »

yxhuvud wrote: post #31
jomohke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything. There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.

That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.

What are you talking about? Do you think the cappers are seeding the torrents themselves?

A lot things happen before you start leeching from tpb...

Post reply on HN