Comments on: BitTorrent's elite switches from Xvid to x264

By: neapel

neapel — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:52:00 +0000

What I’m not getting is: is there still a significant number of people who burn TV episodes on DVDs? That sounds ridiculously complicated…

By: renke

renke — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:12:00 +0000

ah, I see. Thanks a lot!

By: soap

soap — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:54:00 +0000

FFmpeg’s AAC encoder is still producing garbage.

By: tyr

tyr — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:42:00 +0000

Why? Any release worth it was already encoded as h264 in an mkv container All you need to do is pour the stream in the proper container using something like Subler (OSX only though).

By: tyr

tyr — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:36:00 +0000

The fact that WebM if it were successful would also disrupt Apple’s business as a major purveyor of h264 media and players was undoubtably a bonus too. It’s kind of a trend in Google products lately: Android, WebM, Google Music.

By: buenoben

buenoben — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:14:00 +0000

Haha there’s a group calling themselves “Bajskorv”

By: Never Soft

Never Soft — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:48:00 +0000

So true! All of those groups would be mortified at the suggestion that they’re “Torrent” groups. The Scene is more like Fight Club and Torrent sites, Usenet and File hosts just leech off of it.

By: Alexandre Broudin

Alexandre Broudin — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:12:00 +0000

Torrent is not Scene. Please.
Maybe i’m wrong and the scene is totaly fucked up but ASAP, BAJSKORV, C4TV, D2V, DiVERGE, FTP, KYR, LMAO, LOL, MOMENTUM, SYS, TLA and YesTV are not from torrent scene.

By: incant

incant — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 03:35:00 +0000

Cory, that screenshot is horribly broken. You need a font that supports CP-437. On debian/ubuntu the package xfonts-terminus-dos works nicely.

Edit: I just realized that the mistake is TorrentFreak’s.

By: Marc Mielke

Marc Mielke — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 01:25:00 +0000

No, I’m actually being completely sarcastic.

By: trackofalljades

trackofalljades — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:10:00 +0000

I understand why someone would mistakenly believe that “AVI is more widely supported” based on past experience, but that’s not true any more. In fact, that’s very far from being the case today.

There are older devices, many of which can play back divx inside AVI containers but not H.264 inside MP4.

There are newer devices, many of which can play back H.264 inside MP4 containers but not divx inside AVI.

There are currently far, far, far more devices in use that fit the latter description.

The difference between these two install bases is probably somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude honestly.

By: citizen

citizen — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:57:00 +0000

Torrentfreak is laughing at bittorrent users who think these release groups are the people posting their torrents. Judging from the title of this post Cory somehow still has that impression after reading the article.

By: yosemite

yosemite — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:27:00 +0000

What a foolish question. Do you have one of these new-fangled products known as a ‘television screen’, gramps? Then you can run VLC on it.

By: renke

renke — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:27:00 +0000

not that I’m highly interested in the whole release group politics, but is there a rationale for forbidding ffmpeg as audio encoder?

“- Nero and Apple encoders are recommended. FFmpeg is banned.”

By: Scott Frazer

Scott Frazer — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:17:00 +0000

iPhones, iPod touches and iPads can’t play xvid in avi containers. There are 316 million iOS devices in people’s hands. Seems like a large enough market to cater towards.

By: Pedantic Douchebag

Pedantic Douchebag — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Are you asking me a question? I can’t tell, between your lack of proper punctuation, poor capitalization, and irony-laden use of cliché.

By: t8t

t8t — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:37:00 +0000

2009 wants its story back

By: Pedantic Douchebag

Pedantic Douchebag — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:29:00 +0000

I’ve heard good things. Can you use your smartphone as a customizable remote?

By: Patrick McGorrill

Patrick McGorrill — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:13:00 +0000

It must be very hard to have living rooms and TVs. My thoughts and prayers are with you.

By: Steve Pan

Steve Pan — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:24:00 +0000

Now maybe the folks who do games and rips should, hypothetically speaking of course, move away from the hundreds of rar files that they might or may not use for game releases, since the modern broadband era really doesn’t need need that anymore for redundancy and error correction.

By: Cory Schmunsler

Cory Schmunsler — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:08:00 +0000

The “Elite” have been using H.264 for years already. I don’t know who these guys are, but if they were still using XviD they certainly couldn’t have had the “highest quality” releases.

The true Elite have all but completely moved on to the hi-10 profile, which doesn’t have nearly as much hardware or even software support as the hi profile, but they don’t care. If you want the highest quality possible, you have to make some sacrifices.

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Nope. Media Player Classic – Home Cinema.

By: trackofalljades

trackofalljades — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:38:00 +0000

I get that, I mean, I own such a DVD player (OPPO represent!). I will keep it forever because it upscales and deinterlaces better than any newer device on the market and I love the thing…for DVD playback that is.

The fact is though, at this point, the install base for newer devices that support MP4 and not AVI is much much larger than the install base of those older devices. So actually, a greater number of people were being inconvenienced by doing things the old way. That means this change serves a larger audience more conveniently, with the added benefit of the files having a better quality-to-bytesize ratio (in other words, less bandwidth consumption and more files on a given thumbdrive/disc/etc).

By: Drag0nflamez

Drag0nflamez — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:18:00 +0000

yup, Xbox plays MP4 but you need to use Live to download a little codec pack.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:44:00 +0000

Not that hard to cope with. I stream avi/mkv/mp4 with all codecs I care about to my xbox from my PC, with no trouble, using only free tools. TVersity or Media Browser go a long way.

By: Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Never mind release formats. When are they going to bring NFO formats into the 21st century and use Unicode? Pah.

By: Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:11:00 +0000

Well no, but a few seconds googling will confirm for you that your crappy Xbox can play MP4, and without gold membership yadda yadda. So you can sleep soundly tonight.

By: Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:07:00 +0000

Demand your money back!

By: Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:06:00 +0000

You are confusing the container and the codec.

By: Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Is he? The article talks about standardising on both the codecs and the container.