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

51–60 of 125 posts

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#51

Post by gioele »

I wonder if the producers of the content they distribute will ever get that such a high level of quality.

DVDs are often full of interlaced content (even for short movies), broken subtitles, letterboxed pictures, jerking menus; sometimes they even resize the video to 4:3. The rare downloadable videos are often over compressed or barely compressed (thank you for the 2GB file to this 20 minute show). Similar things happens with bought music: I have paid for many albums distributed as badly-encoded MP3s in zip files with __MACOSX directories and ._DS* files.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#52

Post by angry-hacker »

getsat wrote: post #8
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.

> To playback an mp4 file you need to have it wholly 720p or better videos on youtube are all MP4 now. You just have to move some atoms around within the video file to prepare them for "streaming" playback. There's open source software to do this. Then again, the ability to play an incomplete file is not really useful if you're fetching a movie via torrent, which is what I would assume most of these guys are using.

Actually the latest utorrent lets you stream the video files while you're downloading them.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#53

Post by keeperofdakeys »

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).

When DivX made their H264 codec, DivX 7, they actually chose the matroska container. Of course, DivX has lost a lot of the brand name recognition they once had (their logo used to be on nearly every DVD player), so the penetration of matroska in this respect isn't that high. There is also WebM, of which the container uses part of matroska, which might help penetration (of course, its people like Apple and Sony who aren't likely to implement WebM).

Other then that, only a few embedded products support mkv (TVs, set top boxes). These are pretty much impossible to update, so it is pretty much impossible to recommend matroska at this point, since a large amount of people would watch these videos on such products.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#54

Post by donniezazen »

mdda wrote: post #19

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...

Anarchist are more open than content providers. On the other hand, content providers and publishers only act in wake of revenue loss.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#55

Post by sdfsdf123 »

pjscott wrote: post #18
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 enc…

Isn't the multi-part thing for distribution on newsgroups?

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#56

Post by notatoad »

dfc wrote: post #42
spindritf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 labou…

you seem confused on the distinction between the scene and P2P. pretimes have nothing to do with this. the torrent sites aren't the ones doing the capping, encoding, or releasing.

when you see on your torrent site that a show has a pre-time of three minutes, that's the time it took to grab the show from a scene FTP topsite, download it, make a torrent, and upload the .torrent file to whatever site you are using. when a torrent 'pres' is when the scene releases it. before the pretime, the torrent is encoded, rar'd and FTPd to a scene FTP dump.

the reason that split rar files are used is so that the scene uploader only has to upload the first chunk before they can claim credit and other groups can begin to download. if the release was uploaded all in one piece, it would have to be uploaded completely before anybody could start to download it. with split rars, other groups can have the file almost completely downloaded by the time it is completely uploaded.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#58

Post by a4paper »

pjscott wrote: post #34
tomku wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While that's true, VLC has had a history of problems with H.264 (quite ironic), ASS/SSA and ordered chapters that makes them shunned in the anime community. Apparently, libass still has problems with skewed and rotated subtitles. CCCP is much more preferred on Windows.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#59

Post by Danieru »

pjscott wrote: post #34
tomku wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but funsubbers hate VLC since it used to mangle subtitles.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#60

Post by fdr »

dfc wrote: post #44
fdr wrote: 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…

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

I refer to compressed artifacts in general, here. I do not consume "scene" artifacts. I am merely positing that there is no technical reason for the choice in this era. But having lived through the last one, I can understand why it became common then.
Post reply on HN