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Investigating Online Movie Piracy?
kewsh writes "There's an excellent piece from the LA Times via Yahoo! News which explains the interworkings of the movie, music, and software piracy scene, including quotes from former and current scene members: 'Common to most groups is a disdain for selling pirated goods in favor of giving free access to anything and everything'." The article also notes: "Not everyone in the scene is so pure. Some players... are suspected of selling pirated movies and music to commercial bootleggers."
It's the difference between the bootleggers downloading the movie themselves, or being handed/mailed a DVD master copy. It's all about the time involved. It may takes hours or days, depending on connection speed to get the entire movie, but you can overnight ship a master disk to someone easily.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The bootleggers (ie, the people who make and selling lots of unauthorised copies of movies) are paying "the players" (ie, people in the movie industry who can get their hands on screeners and other preview copies) for preview copies of movies.
In other words, some of the people who are opening the door to the bootleggers (or pirates) are charging them for the priviledge.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Try reading the *whole* article before commenting on parts of it:
"According to Nguyen, it takes minutes for a newly released item to reach all of the topsites, but it may take hours or days to reach the lower echelon of private sites. After that, the digital booty leaks out intermittently to online areas more accessible to the public, such as chat channels and news groups.
To get the movies, you just need to wait. But to get the movies as early as possible, you need to know the right people.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
In China you can buy DVDs of just about any movie within days of release in the US, or sometimes before. They all have very nice packages, probably pasted up from promo sites on the web. (However, the English text is often nonsensical, or relating to an entirely different movie. And sometimes they include real reviews from, eg, AICN, like "[Matrix 3] is a steaming pile of crap".) The quality of the movie though is a crapshoot. Sometimes it's a perfect dupe of a DVD release (especially Oscar screeners with the anti piracy notice floating across the bottom every 10 minutes), sometimes a slightly blurry image with good sound, not bad but a bit worse than VCR quality, sometimes it's obviously a video camera in a cinema complete with audience coughs and shadows on the screen. But as they're less than $1 you can just shrug and throw those away, or go back to the shop and exchange it -- it's actually a lot easier to exchange pirated goods than legit; less paperwork I suppose.
The ripping of a DVD itself doesn't take very long. The compression might, but that really depends on how you set it up, how you resize, and how you then compress it. If you know a little bit about what you're doing, you can get those times down, sacrificing quality sometimes. VCD and SVCD is unsurprising as these will play in set tops, and you can encode to VCD more quickly than to higher quality DivX formats.
Common mistakes :
There are many other things as well, like the hardware you have, what you're doing at the same time on the PC, etc. But on a reasonable system you can rip and compress to DivX or XviD in less than three hours. Make sure you have a 2GHz+ processor and plenty of RAM.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
... the BBS scene.
This is certaintly not news. But the article does remind us that the BBS scene is still alive and well. The file sizes have gotten bigger (vs. 340K Apple //e floppies.) But the transmission speeds have also increased. The only difference I see know is that, thanks to P2P, the end-user/downloader gets the goods directly. In the old days, the final user was never granted access to the releaser's or the courier's site. It arrived via the "sneaker net" from a friend of a friend.
You have 5 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em! They will expire before any good stories are posted.
There is a sad actual quote from a German lawsuit where one judge used the following sentence in the official verdict:
n ik
http://daufaq.de/index.php4?aktuellerubrik=Tech
F: Was ist ein FTP-Server?
A: Es antwortet LG Braunschweig, Urteil vom 21.7.2003 - 6 KLs 1/03, rechtskraeftig, CR 2003, 801: FTP-Server sind Systeme, in denen gecrackte, also nach Ueberwindung des Vervielfaeltigungsschutzes kopierte, Software geladen ist.
Translation:
Q: What is an FTP server
A: As answered by the court of Braunschweig, in its decision from July 2003: FTP servers are systems used to store cracked software - software that has been copied after removing its copy protection.
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You may like my a cappella music
Is actually usable as a dvd ripper in linux.
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
No, every such such product is priced according to the maximum that the market will bear. Hence region lockouts on DVDs, with vastly different prices in different regions
.There aren't many places in the world you can pay that much.
Absolutely Right!
It was reported that car manufacturers considered the UK to be the 'Golden Isles' because the British public 'would bear' to pay way more than other european countries.
After a rip-off britain campaign started a few years ago people began to wake and see they were getting stiffed. Example: HMV sells older (not in the charts) CDs at around 17GBP (30.50USD)
We're still getting stiffed in the UK but maybe not quite as bad as we were.
Don.
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Bart: Hey mouse...say cheese. With a dry, cool wit like that, I could be an action hero.
Homer: Die, bad robots, die! With a dry, cool wit like that, I could be an action hero.
Slashdot - The Home of the Tortured Analogy
There is a lot that can be said about encoding/compressing video, and the picture you give is overly simplified.
t for some more info on making high quality svcds using linux or similar.
The 2 main factors for perceived quality are the actual resolution and motion quality.
The details differ for various compression standards, but the basic idea stays the same.
Given a certain bitrate r and a framerate f, you have r bytes to represent f frames. Now, if for example 30 frames are grouped together and you have a 30fps video source, and you use 1200kbit/sec, you will get an average of 1200/30 is 40kbit/frame.
More bandwidth is consumed by so called I frames, and those primarely enhance the 'sharpness' of the movie. The more bandwidth is used for those, the less bandwidth is left for the remaining frames.
The frames bewteen 2 i frames are mostly determining for how well motion looks, and the more bandwidth you have for that, the better fast moving scenes will look.
This is however always a compromise, and finding the best compromise for each group of pictures is one thing that a good encoder will do, optionally with multipass.
Another one is the so called search radius, this value is used during compression to determine how far to look in a frame for parts of a previous frame that may be identical in pixel information, but has been moved.
A high search radius is expensive during compression, but it will allow a much lower bitrate for the same quality, and as such is often a very good investment in time (for svcd resolution and higher, a search radius of 24 is really the minimum, for vcd resolution, 16 will do)
When looking through what is posted online, it is very clear that few people understand how to make decent quality encodings, and even fewer actually spend the efford to do a high quality encoding.
The simple result is that svcd compressions I make for my own use (and directly from DVD) are often of similar or better quality then a divx encoding with a similar size as can be found on the sharing networks.
Of course, applying the same level of attention and knowledge to a divx encoding would mean that I can get a lot more quality still out of the same size in bytes, but portability comes into play there.
checkout http://www.bartsplace.net/publications/videocd.tx
I generally use multipass XviD these days and do reduce resolution because subjectively for me I prefer the results. Objectively, it means the bits per pixel goes up and of course encoding time is reduced. A good bicubic resampling routine tends to soften images but they tend to encode quite nicely compared with full resolution sharp images.
An interesting response. Don't get too many of those these days. The article you linked to is particularly good, thanks a lot for that too, it might encourage me to finally find the time to go back to dual boot Linux (I lost a hard drive with my linux install and I just haven't had the heart to get it all back so far).
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
8 minutes to rip the DVD to disk. 3 minutes to make the project file. ~10 minutes to do a test encode to test compressibility. 4-5 hours (typical 90-120 minute movie) for 2-pass encoding at a very good quality. All in all, less then 5 hours usually with GordianKnot. Once you understand what you are doing, it goes quite quickly.