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TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

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Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#61

Post by tomku »

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.

I hadn't tried it before, but VLC 2.0 is a very impressive improvement over 1.x. I don't have an extensive library of files with crazy features, but it handled everything I threw at it fine. Hopefully they'll keep improving, it's good for the other players to have more competition on features.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#63

Post by 0x09 »

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.

It seems they had previously mandated Xvid, which is very much a conforming implementation of MPEG-4 part 2 (for that matter, DivX has been since 2001.)

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#64

Post by dfc »

notatoad wrote: post #56
dfc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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. Remember all scene groups
   hate torrents and do not want ANY of their stuff
   on torrent sites. If they see someone on their FTP
   sites releasing stuff on torrents, his ip gets
   banned and he gets NFOed sending a warning to
   other FTP sites to delete purge him and never to
   allow him anywhere near scene ever again.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#65

Post by methoddk »

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.

It's still true to this day. Real scene is still done with FXP and then leeched down the food chain to BT/NGz/p2p/etc...

Releases are out for hours before they even make it to open user levels.

Get it where it's hot, yo.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#66

Post by methoddk »

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).

This has nothing to do with NNTP, BT, P2P. All FXP to distributed FTP servers. The RARs are split so that if one server in the farm goes down, the whole release isn't corrupted. Same for transferring the data.

"Racers" move the els to multiple servers. Split RARs allow for multiple people to be moving parts of the same els at the same time.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#67

Post by getsat »

angry-hacker wrote: post #52
getsat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#68

Post by angry-hacker »

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.

By the look of it, yes. With well seeded torrents it actually works very nicely.

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#69

Post by sbarre »

gioele wrote: post #51

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 hap…

That's because there is no competition for those releases, so there is little care for quality.

If content producers released their raw sources and content monetizers had to compete to produce the best possible downloadable and distributable versions, you'd see much better commercial releases. ;-)

Re: TV piracy groups formally adopt h264

#70

Post by politician »

thadeus_venture wrote: post #12

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.

From reading many of the curiously well-informed comments, I suspect that the reason for standardization has to do with speed and validation for credit. Since it sounds like "scene" people arbitrage new releases across scene FTP drop sites for upload credit, a standard method of "settling accounts" via scripts/bots would be useful. Arbitrage would be less efficient if files had to be transcoded between FTP sites.
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