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TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

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Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#81

Post by MrKurtHaeusler »

Who watches SD anymore anyway?

Although I can just imagine all the pirates whining about "h.264 (or mkv as they call it) doesn't play on my dvd player, bring avi (as they call xvid) back".

I can't believe pirates are still burning crappy SD rips to DVD.

Someone I know stopped doing that when he wanted to watch a movie for the second time and realized it was quicker to leech a 1080p bluray rip than search through his mountains of VCD and SVCD discs for the one he downloaded just a couple of years back.

This pirate friend of mine welcomes the change, for the maybe 1 SD show he watches.

Although he personally wishes people paid more attention to sound codecs, nothing worse than downloading something broadcast in 5.1 and finding out the file only has a stereo downmix.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#83

Post by hippich »

gradstudent wrote: post #73
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...

The (movie/audio/warez/demo) "scene" is not anarchic at all but rather a very well organised distributed processing machine. You probably know these guys organise into "groups" but there is lots of other stuff you likely do not know. I will describe below aspects of the warez scene, as it was some 10 years ago. I believe most observations continue to hold today and are probably mirrored in the movie-release scene. So…

Thank you for insight on how scene works. But my main question - where is profit? I.e. what drives this scene and what these groups compete for?

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#84

Post by Indyan »

getsat wrote: post #67
angry-hacker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's pretty cool. How does it achieve that? I'm assuming it assigns a higher priority to the chunks closer to the playback cursor.

Bitcomet has actually beein doing this for ages.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#85

Post by stevenp »

I noticed this today on Usenet. I've switched to downloading all my TV from torrent sites to Usenet because it's much more reliable. Everything old is new again. It's nice to see that the animated shows I enjoy like Family Guy are available in HD resolutions at roughly the same download size as their previously available SD counterparts. I assume animation is really efficiently encoded with h264. Anyway, smaller files and higher quality = happy me.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#86

Post by gradstudent »

hippich wrote: post #83
gradstudent wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (movie/audio/warez/demo) "scene" is not anarchic at all but rather a very well organised distributed processing machine. You probably know these guys organise into "groups" but there is lots of other stuff you likely do not know. I will describe below aspects of the warez scene, as it was some 10 years ago. I believe most observations continue to hold today and are probably mirrored in the movie-release scene. So…

Thank you for insight on how scene works. But my main question - where is profit? I.e. what drives this scene and what these groups compete for?

I already told you: prestige. There is no profit motive, despite anything to the contrary you might have heard from the FBI or BSA. Occasionally people will enter the scene looking for ways to make money but this kind of motivation is seriously frowned upon and the individuals in question are often publically scorned. Simply: you don't earn any rep from being a conman or petty ripoff artist.

Here is a little more context: Most release groups consist of individuals who break copy protection for fun. They compete amongst themselves to create clever hacks and one-up each other. It's a very tightly knit tribal culture: me and mine vs you and yours. Cracking releases or moving releases from one top site to another becomes an interesting game and so too are the metagames and scene politics that surround it. For example: a courier might strive to get friendly with site admins or group leaders who are privvy to upcoming "pres" (or pre-release) so they can get a leg-up on the competition. Be among the top 10 traders on a site for a few weeks and suddenly you have a reputation: you get invited to trade on more prestigious sites, join more prestigious groups and generally pal around with community elders. You develop very strong bonds over time and that's what keeps you in: the scene is where your friends are, it's where people know and respect you. Plus, the competition to be the best can be intoxicating.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#87

Post by methoddk »

hippich wrote: post #83
gradstudent wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (movie/audio/warez/demo) "scene" is not anarchic at all but rather a very well organised distributed processing machine. You probably know these guys organise into "groups" but there is lots of other stuff you likely do not know. I will describe below aspects of the warez scene, as it was some 10 years ago. I believe most observations continue to hold today and are probably mirrored in the movie-release scene. So…

Thank you for insight on how scene works. But my main question - where is profit? I.e. what drives this scene and what these groups compete for?

What gradstudent said. For the prestige and respect. It's a rush, addicting and exhilarating.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#88

Post by jongraehl »

hippich wrote: post #83
gradstudent wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (movie/audio/warez/demo) "scene" is not anarchic at all but rather a very well organised distributed processing machine. You probably know these guys organise into "groups" but there is lots of other stuff you likely do not know. I will describe below aspects of the warez scene, as it was some 10 years ago. I believe most observations continue to hold today and are probably mirrored in the movie-release scene. So…

Thank you for insight on how scene works. But my main question - where is profit? I.e. what drives this scene and what these groups compete for?

I imagine it's satisfying to help people and feel recognized (via group affiliation) for it.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#89

Post by gradstudent »

dfc wrote: post #80
gradstudent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pfft. Pro couriers don't even bother with FXP. A shell account on a fast European box and mget/mput are the weapons of choice.

First of all no "pro courier" is going to be on HN bragging about his "weapons of choice." Second of all FXP was the protocol of choice back in the day(the time period the parent post was referring to). Thirdly, I remember when telix and minicom where "the weapons of choice."

Have you ever traded? If so, where, and for whom?

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#90

Post by xichael »

dfc wrote: post #64
notatoad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From an old text file I have laying around: Scene groups are known as affils or affiliates when they release on a FTP site. When they release something..racers and traders start racing that release to other FTP sites at Gbit speeds using auto mated scripts. When they Release something on a ftp site it is known as to pred or a pre. pre means the release is ready to be raced to other ftp sites NOT torrent sites. Rememb…

Same tome? http://audioz.info/scene_faq.html
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