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TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

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Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#41
post #29
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.

RAR is lame? Are you saying this from the viewpoint of a consumer or from the viewpoint of someone intimately involved in the scene?

Rar has become one of my hot-buttons, so I'll respond as a consumer of compressed files in general:

Multi-file volumes are good and useful for many things, but last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction vs. more readily available encodings, yet is encumbered to boot. (Feel free to correct me, if that is not factual).

Not that pirates probably care very much about that, and backwards-compatibility with old practices is always a consideration, but every time I see someone distributing software in a rar (not even pirated, mind you!) I always sigh deeply. It seldom happens, but...sometimes...

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#42
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

"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."

Okay let me rephrase: "why do you think there are people called racers and/or what do you think pretime is all about?"

"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."

For TV releases? Not a chance. Any decent private torrent site has the TV releases seeding within three minutes of the credits rolling. The capper is the encoder and the someone else taking care of distribution coordination is a bot...

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#44
post #41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAR is lame? Are you saying this from the viewpoint of a consumer or from the viewpoint of someone intimately involved in the scene?

Rar has become one of my hot-buttons, so I'll respond as a consumer of compressed files in general: Multi-file volumes are good and useful for many things, but last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction vs. more readily available encodings, yet is encumbered to boot. (Feel free to correct me, if that is not factual). Not that pirates probably care very mu…

You rarely see scene related products (content/software) distributed in rar format? Really?

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#45
post #41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAR is lame? Are you saying this from the viewpoint of a consumer or from the viewpoint of someone intimately involved in the scene?

Rar has become one of my hot-buttons, so I'll respond as a consumer of compressed files in general: Multi-file volumes are good and useful for many things, but last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction vs. more readily available encodings, yet is encumbered to boot. (Feel free to correct me, if that is not factual). Not that pirates probably care very mu…

> last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction

May be time to check again:

http://www.quickpar.org.uk/AboutPAR2.htm

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#46
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They also don't usually support softsubs or multiple audio tracks, which are completely standard in anime releases. As a result of that, the anime community pretty much gave up on device compatibility when they left XviD behind. People who really want mobile versions tend to transcode, resize and "harden" the subs, but that's a lot of work. That said, I agree that "annoying" is the right word in this case. The Hi10p…

I was actually surprised to find my settop box supported mkv, multiple audio tracks and can even display styled subtitles unstyled (it would need specific support for substation alpha to do this).

Software support for 10bit was pretty much there in some form when they majority started using 10bit, it is a lot more wide spread now (mostly a few programs like mplayer2, vlc and MPC:HC). Support for embedded products (like settop boxes) will be a long time, or maybe never.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rar has become one of my hot-buttons, so I'll respond as a consumer of compressed files in general: Multi-file volumes are good and useful for many things, but last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction vs. more readily available encodings, yet is encumbered to boot. (Feel free to correct me, if that is not factual). Not that pirates probably care very mu…

> last I checked, RAR doesn't offer a compelling advantage in performance, compression, or error correction May be time to check again: http://www.quickpar.org.uk/AboutPAR2.htm

RAR != PAR. You could apply PAR2s to any format, even (gasp) a single file.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#49
post #14
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).

I don't think there are messages with more than 500k on NNTP, a single RAR file won't fit (so theoretically you could encode a 700M file in yenc).

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#50
post #43

I wonder why they have this rule for the Audio: "Nero and Apple encoders are recommended. FFmpeg is banned." What's wrong with FFmpeg?

Internal ffmpeg aac encoder is still experimental and tends to create broken AAC streams at times. The other options:

A) libfaac / libvo_aacenc are pretty bad in terms of quality and have problems with multi-channel audio B) libaacplus only encodes up to 64kbps in less supported AAC+

So Nero and Apple are pretty much only quality free audio encoders for AAC available right now.

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