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Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff

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Chapter 11 – Movies and TV Shows

This chapter covers the naming conventions, file formats, and media players used for movie and TV torrents.

Movie Torrents

A movie torrent can have a name as simple as

Casablanca

or

King Kong (1933)

but most have names like

Inception (2010) DVDRip XviD-MAXSPEED

The standard template for movie torrents is

title year source codec group

Title. The movie’s title usually appears as it does in IMDB External link and can include a modifier like Director’s Cut, Theatrical Release, Unrated, Extended, or, for series, Trilogy, Anthology, Collection, or Boxset.

Year. The movie’s release year helps when searching for remakes, new movies, and movies from a specific year. If you’re looking for the 1951 version of the often-remade A Christmas Carol, include 1951 in your search phrase.

Source. The source tells how the movie was copied and is crucial in deciding whether to download. See “Sources” later in this chapter.

Codec. A codec (short for coder/decoder or compressor/decompressor) is a small piece of software installed on your computer that lets you play back digital video that’s been encoded in a certain way. Most movies use DivX, Xvid, x264, H.264, MPEG, or WMV codecs. Torrent releases are now so standardized and competitive that it’s rare to find a movie that won’t play on common media players.

Group. Organized piracy groups (called scene groups) race each other to become the first provider of quality movies. Each group appends its internet alias to its torrents’ names. Certain groups appear repeatedly in the top movie torrents. One of the best known is aXXo, retired in 2009 yet whose legacy torrents are still going strong. If you download an older torrent, read the user comments to make sure it’s not a fake with a forged group name.

Sources

Pirated movies are released with varying picture and sound quality over time. In general, early releases are worse than later ones because high-quality (digital) sources don’t appear until the DVD goes on sale. When a better-sourced movie is released, inferior-sourced torrents start dying immediately. The common sources, from lowest quality to highest, are:

Cam copies are recorded in the theater by using a smuggled handheld or tripod-mounted camcorder. Audio is sourced from the camera’s microphone. Quality is awful but offers the viewer a taste of being there: audience noises, people standing in front of the screen, ringtones, and bright little cellphone windows. Cams are released immediately after a movie previews or premiers.

Quality: Low.
Torrent labels: CAM, CAMRip.
Example: Faster 2010 CAM XVID LKRG.

Telesync copies look as bad as cams but sound better because audio is captured directly from the theater’s sound system (possibly in cahoots with the projectionist). Telesyncs are released at the same time as cams.

Quality: Low.
Torrent labels: TS, TELESYNC.
Example: How.To.Train.Your.Dragon.2010.TS.XviD-PrisM.

Screeners are ripped (copied) from leaked review DVDs that movie studios send to critics, Academy voters, and film execs. Screeners show a movie’s theatrical release but are degraded by sudden color changes, “Property of Whatever Pictures” overlays, or slightly fuzzy video. Screeners can appear at any time, even before cams.

Quality: Medium.
Torrent labels: SCR, SCREENER, DVDSCR, DVDSCREENER.
Example: The Social Network 2010 DVDSCR XViD WBZ.

R5s are ripped from Region 5 retail DVDs. (Region-coding prevents DVDs from working in players outside the countries where they’re marketed — an irrelevance to pirates.) Region 5 includes Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, and other countries where legal but inferior DVDs compete with rampant piracy. R5s are released before DVD-Rips.

Quality: Medium.
Torrent label: R5.
Example: Knight and Day (2010) R5 XviD-MAXSPEED.

PPV-Rips are sourced from pay-per-view movies on hotel-room TVs. They’re released before DVD-Rips.

Quality: Medium.
Torrent labels: PPVRip, PPV.
Example: Devil 2010 PPVRip IFLIX.

DVD-Rips are copied from retail DVDs and are the most popular type of movie torrents.

Quality: High.
Torrent label: DVDRip.
Example: The Graduate 1967 DVDrip XviD-Ekolb.

DVDRs are full copies of retail DVDs, including menus and bonus features but not copyright warnings, ads, and other cruft. Some DVDRs are compressed from their original dual-layer (DVD-9) format so they can be burned on cheaper, single-layer (DVD-5) DVDs. “Untouched” DVDRs are perfect copies of the original DVDs, cruft and all.

Quality: High.
Torrent labels: DVDR, DVD-R, DVD-Full, Full-Rip.
Example: Iron Man 2 (2010) DVD-R NTSC (eng-spa) [Sk].

HDTV-Rips are recorded from high-definition television signals, typically via a digital video recorder (DVR) or PC video-capture card. HDTV-Rips are labeled according to how they’re sourced and encoded.

Quality: High.
Torrent labels: HDTV, PDTV, DSR, DVB, TVRip, STV, DTH.
Example: Tarzan.1999.720p.HDTV.x264.

BD-Rips and BR-Rips are copied from high-definition Blu-ray disks. BD-Rips are slightly better than BR-Rips. The resolution, 720p or 1080p, is the number of horizontal scan lines of display resolution. High-res files are big but yield sharp images. If you have a 720p display, don’t bother downloading a 1080p file.

Quality: Very High.
Torrent labels: BDRip, BRRip, Bluray, MKV, BDR, BD5, BD9.
Example: Inception 720p BluRay x264 CROSSBOW.

Less-common (and low-quality) sources include Workprint (WP), Telecine (TC), VHS-Rip (VHSRip), and Pre-DVD (PDVD).

TV Torrents

The standard template for TV torrents is

title episode source codec group

For single-episode torrents, SnnEmm denotes the season or series and episode number. S02E11 means season 2, episode 11. Alternative formats include 02x11 and 211. The episode’s title sometimes follows (or replaces) the episode number. Examples:

Multi-episode torrents labeled Season, Series, Complete, All, or Boxset contain all episodes from a single season or series, or every episode in the life of the program:

Daily soap operas, talk shows, and chat shows (whose torrents tend to die quickly) are labeled by air date (yyyy-mm-dd) or episode (SnnEmm):

Miniseries and documentaries are labeled sequentially as they air:

Sports are labeled by date, game, teams, event, or season:

Shows are released as HDTV rips right after they air. Multi-episode torrents are released as HDTV, DVD, or Blu-ray rips after a season or series ends, or is released on retail disks. WS (widescreen) denotes a 16:9 width-to-height aspect ratio, rather than the older 4:3 ratio. For details about the codec and group, see “Movie Torrents” earlier in this chapter (one of the most prolific TV piracy groups is EZTV).

Video Formats

Most videos other than Blu-ray rips come as standard-definition AVI (.avi) files. The file size of a half-hour TV show is about 175 MB. A two-hour movie is about 700 MB (or twice that for higher-quality copies). At decent speeds, downloading an AVI file takes less time than watching it.

High-definition Blu-ray rips come as MKV (.mkv) or MPEG (.mp4, .mpg, .mpeg, .m4v) files. MKV is also called the Matroska format. Two-hour movies typically run between 2 GB and 12 GB, depending on content and quality (resolution, frame rate, audio streams, and so on). These files can take a day or two to download. If the torrent includes a sample video snippet, download and watch it first before committing to the entire torrent.

Less-common video formats include QuickTime (.mov), Ogg (.ogg, .ogm, .ogv), Flash (.flv, .swf), RealMedia (.rm, .rv), Video Object or VOB (.vob), and Windows Media (.wmv, .asf). VOB is a type of MPEG format. Adult video (porn) is the only genre that favors .wmv files. Some downloads come as disk images such as ISO (.iso) or CUE/BIN (.cue/.bin) files (for details, see “Mounting Disk Images” in Chapter 15). If you download a video in an unfamiliar format, search for the filename extension at Wikipedia External link or fileinfo.com External link.

Peers who post user comments like

V:9
A:8

are rating, on a 1-to-10 scale, video and audio quality with respect to the file format: a “9” MKV looks a lot better than a “9” AVI. (Pirate cinéastes rate the movie itself by appending an M:7 or such.) Before you download, glance at the early comments for a ratings consensus and for mislabeling warnings (cams masquerading as telesyncs, or R5s as DVD rips).

Media Players

For Windows and OS X playback, use VLC media player External link; it’s free and plays almost everything thrown at it. MPlayer External link and SMPlayer External link work well too. Avoid Windows Media Player and iTunes, which come with Windows and OS X but can’t play many formats. See also Wikipedia’s list of media players External link.

VLC media player

For iOS playback on iPad, iPhone, and iPod, try CineXPlayer (or VLC on jailbroken devices). For Android devices, there’s VPlayer and RockPlayerBase. These and similar players are available from Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market, or via Cydia for jailbreaks. Apps are updated to play catch-up to the number of supported video formats. Your best bet for smooth playback on mobile devices is a standard-definition AVI file using the DivX/Xvid codec.

For TV playback, I use Western Digital’s WD TV Live. Similar players are made by ASUS, Iomega, LaCie, Popcorn Hour, and Seagate. Modern players let you play videos directly from a portable USB drive or stream them wirelessly from a networked computer. Older players, like Philips’ DVP5960, are cheap but can’t play many now-common formats. Avoid Apple TV. Out of the box, it’s limited to iTunes-compatible videos (H.264/MPEG-4). If you already own one, poke around the web for jailbreaks and hacks to play unconverted AVI and MKV files.

AVI, MKV, MPEG, and many other video formats are container formats, meaning the filename extension alone doesn’t dictate the video’s encoding scheme. A given .avi file can use any of scores of available compression standards, hence the need for robust media players that can interpret a wide range of formats. Container formats are confusing and average users don’t need to know much about them. A video either will or will not play and, if not, you can try a different player or download a different version of the same video. For technical details, start with Wikipedia’s article about container formats External link.

Dubbing and Subtitles

In a dubbed video, the voices of the original actors are replaced by those of substitutes speaking a different language (specifically, the local language of a foreign market). A torrent’s name, filenames, or release notes indicate the dubbing language:

Dubbing works well for animation, but for live actors ranges from distracting to comical (the canonical example being Godzilla movies where Japanese actors speak fractured, out-of-sync English). You’re better off with an undubbed video that has subtitles: textual dialogue overlaid as captions at the bottom of the screen. Subtitles come in three flavors:

Hard subtitles, also called hardsubs or open subtitles, are merged in the original video and can’t be turned off (think karaoke). Hardsubs are inflexible but require no special software or hardware for playback.

Prerendered subtitles, also called closed subtitles, are embedded in the video but can be turned on or off or display different languages (like the subtitles of DVD and Blu-ray disks). Newer formats like MKV can handle prerendered subtitles, but older formats like AVI can’t.

Soft subtitles, also called softsubs or closed subtitles, come as separate files that you load in tandem with the video file. Softsubs are the most common type of torrent subtitles.

Support for closed subtitles varies by media player. In VLC media player, for example, you can use the Video > Subtitles Track menu to turn on or off subtitles, choose a language, or open a subtitle file.

VLC media player Subtitles Track menu

The most common and widely supported subtitle format is SRT or SubRip (.srt), named for the popular program that extracts video subtitles and timing cues from DVDs into text files. You can find a torrent’s subtitle files in the same folder as the accompanying video or in their own folder named “Subtitles” or “Subs”. Filenames indicate the language:

To open subtitles at any time in VLC media player, choose Video > Subtitles Track > Open File. To load subtitles at the same time the video starts, choose Media (or File) > Advanced Open File, select a video file, turn on the “subtitles file” checkbox, and then select a subtitle file. Other options let you control the subtitles’ font size and alignment.

VLC media player Open Media dialog box, with selected video file and corrsponding subtitles file

Other subtitle file formats include SUB or SubViewer (.sub) and VobSub (paired .sub and .idx files). For VobSub, open the .idx file, not the .sub file. Many other less-common formats exist. If you meet an unfamiliar one, read Wikipedia’s article about subtitles External link.

Text-based subtitle files are easy to create and edit. (You can open an .srt file in a text editor to see its format.) If a torrent has no subtitle files, you can search for unofficial fansubs created by fans of movies and TV shows. To find fansubs, visit a subtitles site like opensubtitles.org External link or subscene.com External link, or search the web for what you’re looking for followed by the word subtitles (for example, battle royale subtitles).

Other Videos

In addition to mainstream movie, TV, sports, and documentary torrents, you can find:

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