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TV piracy groups formally adopt h264
- janogonzalez 15y agoMuch better than Xvid
- GvS 15y agoThey are so slow, anime groups seems most innovative and use Hi10P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles) since almost a year.
- pjscott 15y agoFor 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 encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it. There's probably a broader lesson in all this.
- jomohke 15y agoI 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.
- yxhuvud 15y agoThat may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice due to Bittorrent.
- krakensden 15y agoThis is the upstream of the public bittorrent releases- and they still do lots of strange, unfashionably archaic stuff.
- dfc 15y agoWhat are you talking about? Do you think the cappers are seeding the torrents themselves? A lot things happen before you start leeching from tpb...
- icebraining 15y agoBittorrent isn't used just on public sites; you can use the same technology to share between a very select group.
- methoddk 15y agoIt'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.
- glomph 15y ago>hours This is rarely true of most scene releases these days. They will hit private bittorrent trackers often within seconds of preing, and public ones not long after that.
- tomku 15y agoInternal 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.
- sdfsdf123 15y agoIsn't the multi-part thing for distribution on newsgroups?
- menoyou 15y agoIt's a lesson our ancestors learned a long time ago and which some people are trying to remove from the pages of history. It's called the free market.
- CoolGuySteve 15y agoA lot of devices don't support High Profile, let alone Hi10P. Frankly, getting video in Hi10P sounds more annoying than 'innovative'.
- tomku 15y agoThey 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 switch has caused a lot of problems even for people with PCs - software support took ages to reach acceptable levels, and it requires a lot more CPU power on the decoding side for a very minor quality increase. They could've waited 6-12 months before pushing for wider Hi10p adoption, and I think it would've gone much more smoothly.
- keeperofdakeys 15y agoI 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.
- tomku 15y agoAnime 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 with MPC-HC and CCCP[1] without DXVA) with coincidental support for Mplayer on Linux because it uses the same basic open source codecs and splitters. Hi10p is even more aggressive - when they started releasing Hi10p releases, the only decoder that supported it was ffdshow alphas, and even now software support for it is very sparse. Hardware support is non-existent, and will continue to be so unless a mainstream content provider like Apple decides to start releasing Hi10p video content. On the other hand, people who watch non-anime scene releases are much more likely to use mobile devices, set-top boxes and other A/V equipment that relies on hardware decoding support. One of the major reasons that scene releases are standardized is so that they'll play on a wide variety of hardware, and this results in a much more conservative approach than anime groups. The main reason they're moving forward with this change is because H.264 has acceptable support in hardware (primarily in the MP4 container, MKV support is awful) and XviD is really showing its age compared to modern H.264 encoders like x264. [1] - Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net) and the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net http://www.cccp-project.net)
- pjscott 15y agoThis is a fairly recent development, but VLC 2.0 will play just about anything out there, on any of the big three operating systems.
- yxhuvud 15y agoYeah. It was the same thing when bittorrent became big. It was the anime groups that were the first big adopters. Mainstream releases took a lot longer.
- wmf 15y agoFinally, 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.
- spindritf 15y agoHDTV 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 inconvenient and wasteful.
- dfc 15y agoI 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.
- tvon 15y agoI 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).
- cultureulterior 15y agoThat's why you use yenc. Personally, I believe it's to do with now bypassed limitations of parity programs.
- dfc 15y agoEverything about the scene is for non-torrent sharing (atleast public / largescale distribution). The scene groups hate public torrent sites/users.
- tonfa 15y ago
- aw3c2 15y agoAbout 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.
- felixge 15y ago> To playback an mp4 file you need to have it wholly (please correct me if I am wrong) You are. By default, many tools put the meta data of mp4 files at the end of the file which means you have to have the whole file before playing. However, such mp4 files can be "fixed" using tools like this: https://github.com/danielgtaylor/qtfaststart https://github.com/danielgtaylor/qtfaststart
- getsat 15y ago> 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.
- angry-hacker 15y agoActually the latest utorrent lets you stream the video files while you're downloading them.
- getsat 15y agoThat's pretty cool. How does it achieve that? I'm assuming it assigns a higher priority to the chunks closer to the playback cursor.
- angry-hacker 15y ago
- thadeus_venture 15y agoWhat 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.
- politician 15y agoFrom 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.
- dfc 15y agoThe title is a little misleading. This is a new standard for SD content. http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2011_X264.2.nfo http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2011_X264.2.nfo
- okamiueru 15y agoThank you. I was a bit surprised by the mp4 container (instead of matroska), as well as DTS not being allowed. Now it all makes sense, and it's not really a big deal at all. SD content is mostly being used on smartphones and tablets. For iOS users, this would require a lot of extra work to convert the files to the limited container choices.
- okamiueru 15y agoA part of me would like iOS users to deal with the inconveniences of their more locked down platform, and also show some love for matroska. Conforming to restrictive policies is a good way of allowing restrictive policies.
- mdda 15y agoPersonally, 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...
- sp332 15y agoIt's because there's a huge amount of competition in the "scene" to get first and best copies of a show. In order to declare a "winner" in the competitions, there have to be rules.
- donniezazen 15y agoAnarchist are more open than content providers. On the other hand, content providers and publishers only act in wake of revenue loss.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y agoIt's funny because if it weren't for the pirates there'd be no innovation and new distribution means or it would be extremely slow. Hollywood and the music industry had become so stagnant, that it took pirates to get them to change their idea of distribution, I think.
- nsns 15y agoEven more funny, for the fact that Hollywood was originally built in order to pirate Edison's patents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#Backlash_and_Decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company...
- gradstudent 15y agoThe (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: "The scene" is made up of groups and each group is made up of specialists: suppliers provide material for release, crackers (or rippers, depending on context) remove copy protection and sometimes optional "filler" material, coders write useful helper software for the group and couriers distribute releases around the internet. Not all groups fill every role and some may have other roles I did not describe here (hackers, carders, hardware suppliers to name a few). There are sometimes partnerships between groups with different specialities; usually this occurs when there is an overlap in membership. For example: a release group may have close links with a particular courier group and those guys handle all their releases. The distribution process is actually quite interesting. Each successful release group aims to have a small list of affiliations with well known and prestigious underground boards/ftp-sites. The quality and prestige of a board depends on the speed of its connection, its capacity, its group affiliations, the standing of its admins in the community and the speed with which new releases are uploaded to it. Each well regarded site is allowed only one particular kind of affiliation: a games group affil, an apps group affil, a courier affil, an ISO affil -- you get the idea. The important thing is that there is only one of each. Affiliations carry prestige for a site and being affiliated with the best sites raises a group's prestige, so there is often heated competition between sites and groups for affils. This is the case at least in the so called "zero second" scene where releases are "traded" (i.e. re-uploaded) by couriers within seconds of being first uploaded. Once a release has been traded among all zero-second sites, they slowly filter down to lesser and lesser sites until eventually making their way to the Internet at large. So why would you go this all this trouble? The reasons are myriad but usually it comes down to prestige: for example, among couriers there is a longstanding weekly and monthly competition between groups that prove their chops by trying to dominate each other. Similar competitions exist among release groups. There is huge pressure to be the first to release a highly anticipated game or well known application. Additionally, there are strict rules about how to release something -- what to keep, what can (and should) be omitted, how to package everything up, the inclusion of .nfo and .diz files and so on. Failure to comply with these strict standards renders a release invalid and causes it to be "nuked" (deleted) among the top sites. This process amounts to a public shaming of the group responsible and makes it possible for competing groups to snatch the credit by doing a "proper" release. I could go on and on but I think that's enough for now. Hopefully I've convinced you that pirates aren't an anarchic bunch ;)
- mikecane 15y agoI wondered why I was suddenly seeing x264 instead of AVI for TV files. I thought it had to do with the lockers going down. Well, in a way this will make things even worse for the CopyNazis. No longer will people have to convert from AVI to watch on their tablets and phones.
- okamiueru 15y agoI suppose you mean mp4 instead of avi, as avi is only a container. So the discussion is two-fold, the container format (mp4, mkv, avi) and the encoding of audio, subtitles and video, of which the latter, h264 is pretty much the standard, and xviD/Divx are and have been for almost a decade, deprecated.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ars 15y agoI wonder why they have this rule for the Audio: "Nero and Apple encoders are recommended. FFmpeg is banned." What's wrong with FFmpeg?
- tonfa 15y agoI don't think AAC encoding is a strong point for ffmpeg.
- Mavrik 15y agoInternal 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.
- gioele 15y agoI 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.
- sbarre 15y agoThat'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. ;-)
- rmc 15y agoThis is why open source works. People can make matches and fix up the original content. If only all content like this was open source.
- naner 15y agoApparently, some pirates are upset even threatened to boycott(!?) https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release-groups-dump-xvid-120303/ https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv...
- ktizo 15y agoThe main question is, with all this technical skill, are they going to release any films of their own?
- jrockway 15y agoVery little about film making has to do with x264 encoders and torrents. Anyone can do those things... Louis CK figured it out, anyway.
- ktizo 15y agoMy point was that there is a large community that has gathered around the idea of sharing films. Large enough to make them want to issue standards. All I'm saying is with that size of community dedicated to sharing film, they should be producing more films. Especially if they dislike the current paradigm enough to remove themselves from its market.
- _delirium 15y agoIf the skillsets overlap, that kind of shift towards production does happen. For example, the 80s game-cracking scene also became the 80s demoscene, because the various skills they acquired in cracking copy protection overlapped a lot with the kinds of skills that were useful for producing interesting interactive-art type software. It's not clear that x264 encoding and distribution produces skillsets that a particular helpful for film production, though, so I don't see a strong reason to expect them to start producing films.
- glomph 15y agoKnowing about networks and codecs isn't really the same as knowing how to write a screenplay etc.
- MrKurtHaeusler 15y agoWho 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.
- rmccue 15y agoI do, for two reasons: 1) I watch it in the corner of my screen, so I'm fine with 320. 2) Here in Australia, we pay for usage. I'm not going to download something in a high quality if I'm near my limit
- danberger 15y agoI love the fact all warez groups stick to the old tradition of only making the 'i' lowercase in their names.
- stevenp 15y agoI 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.
- digitalwingx 15y agoAnyone knows a good way to convert old xvid tv shows to h264 in batch?