
TV piracy groups formally adopt h264 - JonnieCache
http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2012_SDTVx264r.nfo
======
mdda
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...

~~~
gradstudent
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:

"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 ;)

~~~
hippich
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?

~~~
shocks
Topsites can offer a pay to leech scheme. It's often a hushed topic and people
don't like to talk about it (because it is insecure). Many topsites are at it.

A lot of scene members react badly to topsites like this, and often people
infiltrate such sites and public a "scene notice" about them containing siteop
nicknames, hostnames, IRC/FTP details, and screenshots.

Scene notices are like the news system of the scene. They allow people to
publish messages that will disseminated to all the other scene topsites.

~~~
shibboleth
Let's not forget about hardware donors. Donate a hard drive? Get an account
and some credits! Sites such as LSD and LOOP did this.. and many more still
do.

------
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.

~~~
sbarre
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. ;-)

------
GvS
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.

~~~
pjscott
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 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
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.

~~~
yxhuvud
That may have been true at one point, but it is a totally obsolete practice
due to Bittorrent.

~~~
dfc
What 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
Bittorrent isn't used just on public sites; you can use the same technology to
share between a very select group.

------
dfc
The title is a little misleading. This is a new standard for SD content.

<http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2011_X264.2.nfo>

~~~
okamiueru
Thank 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
A 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.

------
ars
I wonder why they have this rule for the Audio: "Nero and Apple encoders are
recommended. FFmpeg is banned."

What's wrong with FFmpeg?

~~~
Mavrik
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.

------
naner
Apparently, some pirates are upset even threatened to boycott(!?)

[https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-
tv...](https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release-
groups-dump-xvid-120303/)

------
danberger
I love the fact all warez groups stick to the old tradition of only making the
'i' lowercase in their names.

------
wmf
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.

~~~
spindritf
HDTV 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
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.

~~~
tvon
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).

~~~
methoddk
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.

------
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.

------
aw3c2
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.

~~~
wmf
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).

~~~
keeperofdakeys
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.

------
thadeus_venture
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.

~~~
politician
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.

------
mikecane
I 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
I 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.

------
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.

~~~
rmccue
I 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

------
digitalwingx
Anyone knows a good way to convert old xvid tv shows to h264 in batch?

------
janogonzalez
Much better than Xvid

------
ktizo
The main question is, with all this technical skill, are they going to release
any films of their own?

~~~
jrockway
Very little about film making has to do with x264 encoders and torrents.
Anyone can do those things... Louis CK figured it out, anyway.

~~~
ktizo
My 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
If 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.

