The quality and popularity of pirated movie release types vary widely, due to the different sources and methods used for acquiring the video content, the development and adoption of encoding formats, and differing preferences on the part of suppliers and end users as to quality and size-efficiency.
Pirated movie releases may be derived from cams, which have distinctly low quality; screener and workprint discs or digital distribution copies (DDC), telecine copies from analog reels, video on demand (VOD) or TV recordings, and DVD and Blu-ray rips.
This enables groups to pirate movies which are in their theatrical period (not released for personal entertainment).
This method often results in distinctly low quality and requires undetected videotaping in a movie theaters.
Although its authors only intended the software to be used for playback purposes,[2] it also meant that one could decode the content perfectly for ripping; combined with the DivX 3.11 Alpha codec released shortly after, the new codec increased video quality from near VHS to almost DVD quality when encoding from a DVD source.
The early DivX releases were mostly internal for group use, but once the codec spread, it became accepted as a standard and quickly became the most widely used format for the scene.
Although the DivX codec has evolved from version 4 to 10.6 during this time, it is banned[3] in the warez scene due to its commercial nature.
In February 2012, a consortium of popular piracy groups officially announced x264, the free H.264 codec, as the new standard for releases,[4] replacing the previous format, which was Xvid wrapped in an AVI container.
With the increasing popularity of online movie-streaming sites like Netflix, some movies are being ripped from such websites now and are being encoded in HEVC wrapped in Matroska containers.
Below is a table of pirated movie release types along with respective sources, ranging from the lowest quality to the highest.
The quality ranges from subpar to adequate, depending on the group of persons performing the recording and the resolution of the camera used.
Some workprints have a time index marker running in a corner or on the top edge; some may also include a watermark.
A workprint might be an uncut version, and missing some material that would appear in the final movie (or including scenes later cut).
A Telecine is a copy captured from a film print using a machine that transfers the movie from its analog reel to digital format.
Telecine machines usually cause a slight left-right jitter in the picture and have inferior color levels compared to DVD.
A screener normally has a message overlaid on its picture, with wording similar to: "The film you are watching is a promotional copy.
Apart from this, some movie studios release their screeners with a number of scenes of varying duration shown in black-and-white.
Aside from this message, and the occasional B&W scenes, screeners are normally of only slightly lower quality than a retail DVD-Rip, due to the smaller investment in DVD mastering for the limited run.
The R5 tag refers to the DVD region 5 which consists of Russia, the Indian subcontinent, most of Africa, North Korea, and Mongolia.
The result of this process is an almost retail DVD quality surround sound audio track which is included in the movie release.
[17] A DVD-Rip is a final retail version of a film,[clarification needed] typically released before it is available outside its originating region.
HDTV stands for captured source from HD television, while PDTV (Pure Digital TV) stands for any SDTV rip captured using solely digital methods from the original transport stream, not from HDMI or other outputs from a decoder, it can also refer to any standard definition content broadcast on a HD channel.
Most services will state that ripping or capturing films is a breach of their use policy, but it is becoming more and more popular as it requires little technology or setup.
The quality of this release is lower than a WEB as it is screen recorded, and it is a less preferred option due to the subtitles being baked into the video and cannot be removed, hence the HC tag.
Essentially, the quality of the image obtained depends on internet connection speed and the specifications of the recording machine.
In a WEBRip (P2P), the file is often extracted using the HLS or RTMP/E protocols and remuxed from a TS, MP4 or FLV container to MKV.
WEB-DL (P2P) refers to a file losslessly ripped from a streaming service, such as Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, Crunchyroll, Discovery GO, BBC iPlayer, etc, or downloaded via an online distribution website such as iTunes.
[clarification needed] They can be ripped from BD25, BD50 disc (or UHD Blu-ray at higher resolutions or bitrates), and even Remuxes.
They are AVCHD compatible using the BD folder structure (sometimes called Bluray RAW/m2ts/iso), and are usually intended to be burnt back to disk for play in AVCHD-compatible Blu-ray players.