History of Movie Pirates

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) defines movie piracy as "the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission." The history of movie piracy is tangled up in ever-advancing technologies. Video equipment, DVDs and the Internet have all played a part in obtaining and selling films illegally. Movie piracy causes extreme economic loss in countries all over the world. International, federal and state laws exist to protect consumers, companies and artists from copyright theft.

History

Movie piracy started with pirates using camcorders to copy movies shown in a theater, a process known as "ripping." The sound, via the camera's microphone, was of poor quality because audience noises were also recorded. These cam rips were put on the Internet, usually after a film premiere.

Seeking improved audio quality, pirates began to synchronize cam rips with a second recording. These cam/telesyncs use professional mics with no audience in the theater. They are captured directly from the theater's sound system or from FM radio transmissions.

Another common movie pirate method is copying screener DVDs. Movie companies often release promotional copies of a film for critics and industry people to review in advance. Pirates remove the Promotional Copy Only message and release it as a DVD rip. The digital age has ushered in a plethora of ways to steal. Currently, television connections provide the most common way to pirate movies. Subscription TV, digital stream and HDTV rips are becoming more popular with the advancement of satellite and high-definition TV (HDTV). HDTV quality can be better than DVD quality.

Best Movie Ripper

There are few things we are going to take in to account while sorting movie rippers according to their merits. The quality of the movie ripp has to be really good. We are not striving for HD quality but the ripp should look good on all kinds of media that display moving pictures. The following which must be taken into account is audio quality. Let us be honest. It is easier for most movie fans to obtain great sound for their home theaters then HD monitors or TVs. With great audio on movie ripp the watching experience will be doubled. This is why audio is second most important thing you need to be taking into consideration while picking your favorite movie ripper/uploader do download from.

Next that should be taken in to consideration is file size of the ripped movie. Although this does not apply to these users/downloaders who possess very high speed internet at their homes I still think that most of you will rather go withlow file size so you could have that movie down in time that will take you to make coffee.

Now, the three above mentioned values are really crucial and if the ripper doesn’t satisfy all three of them, at least in some normal quality range, don’t bother downloading cause you might end up spoiling your movie.

There are two more thing that should be taken in to account. Upload rateand Means of choosing upcoming movies are not that important but if you are a real movie fan, and are addicted, and have to watch at least three movies a week then these two should be taken in to account. Finding a good movie to watch can be a pain in the ass.

Never the less, the easiest way to find a good movie to watch is to find a good ripper/uploader that has good uploade rate and picks movies for ripping and uploading that are rated good at imdb.com or rottentomatos.com. And that is why these two qualities should also be taken in to account.

Oh, I almost forgot, would be good if the ripper/uploader was around for some time, like a year or so, that would give him, probably, tons of verified torrents to show off. Therefore – years on the scene!

There are quite few really good active move rippers out here on the scene. Even though the number one, by people standards and even fulfilling most of our standards to, is, without any doubt,YIFY, we must admit that there are few rippers out there that are even better, but are or haven’t had the luck – knowledge to come to the surface as YIFY. It’s all said their and there is no need to repeat myself except to point out that YIFY is retired and there is a group of rippers hiding behind his name now. Still we will give him the benefit of “The Number One Movie Ripper in The World“.

Rise and fall of YIFY :

It's never been hard to pirate movies, but for a long time, one collective has made it easier to watch the latest blockbusters than any other: YIFY. By focusing on speed, better quality rips and small file sizes, the group quickly grew to become the number one source for illegal movies, catering for the needs of millions of content pirates around the world. However, the YIFY name may soon fade into obscurity after it was revealed that its leader had been traced and named in a New Zealand lawsuit following a joint operation between the MPAA and its "international affiliates." While many believe that its releases won't be missed, YIFY's shutdown will leave a big hole in the piracy market and have a knock-on effect on streaming services like Popcorn Time -- at least until another group steps up.

Before YIFY, there was aXXo. aXXo was the alias of an individual who specialized in leaking DVD-quality rips of new movies to torrent sites that were nearly always encoded in files under 700MB. There were many imitators, but none could match the speed or breadth of aXXo leaks. When the prolific pirate signed off in 2009, it took YIFY around a year to begin uploading torrents to sites like PublicHD, KickassTorrents, 1337x, The Pirate Bay, and ExtraTorrent. According to records on KickassTorrent, the first YIFY upload was a DVD rip of Toy Story 1 & 2 in 2010.

It took around a year of third-party uploads for YIFY to gain enough momentum to launch its own website, which you may know as YTS. In an interview with TorrentFreak, its creator, who was today revealed to have run the website from a house in Auckland, New Zealand, revealed that the group's mission was to "bring Hollywood films to the masses at smaller file-size." The group used the x264 video standard to encode movies at around the tenth of the size of a ripped Blu-ray disc. YIFY justifies its operation by saying it lets "users from all parts of the world, who have bandwidth or hard drive limitations, download and enjoy this content."

If you head to any popular movie torrent site right now, you'll notice that the majority of high-definition releases are YIFY uploads. The Pirate Bay, for example, lists 72 YIFY movies in its Top 100 HD movie section. In five years, over 4,500 infringing titles have been shared on such sites, and before the group was shut down, new movies would appear every few hours.

With YIFY gone, torrent sites face becoming stagnant as the pace of new releases drops. What also hasn't been considered is the effect the group's demise will have on streaming services like Popcorn Time and Kodi movie streaming plugins. While the MPAA and Hollywood studios have successfully shut down various forks of the Bittorrent-based platform, users have flocked to its many copycats. But there may soon be a dearth of new movies to stream.

Pirated Movie Release Types :

Nobody can deny that they have never seen or downloaded pirated movies, actually without pirated movies life would get a tad bit boring. In recent times the pirated Version of the movies are available on the Internet on the same day of movie release. But before downloading pirated movies always check the release formats. Without the basic knowledge of different pirated movie formats you would be left with a bad copy of the film when other better prints were available for download. So i thought about writing about the popular pirated movie formats. Mostly the information is taken from wikipedia but i have also included my own opinions and experiences of the formats so if you want you can take a look at the wikipedia article. So here are the different formats arranged mostly in the sequence of their releases time.

Type:- CAM
Label:- CAMRip or CAM
Mostly CAM version of the movies appear online on the same day of movie release. CAM copies of the movies are made by recording the movie using a camcorder in the theaters. Due to this, the print quality depends upon the quality of the camcorder. The sound quality too is not that good as it is recorded by the camcorder.
Note:- If you are in a real hurry to watch the movie and the only available version is a CAM, then try to download the movie from good site uploaded by popular warez groups like FXG, aXXo, Devise etc. If downloading from torrent please read the comments, you can get a fairly good idea of the print by reading the comments.

Type:- Telesync
Labels:- TS or PreDVD
TS versions are CAM versions with a better audio from a secondary source.
PreDVD are rips of pirated DVD sold on the roadside. They too actually are CAM versions, maybe of higher quality.
Note:- If you have waited for a TS and PreDVD copy i would suggest to wait a couple of days more for better quality prints.

Type:- Web Rip
Label:- WEBRip or HDRip
These are rips of the movies from the online channel.They are good quality prints and with good sound. Recently this prints have become very common.

Type:- Screener
Label :- DVDScr
These are the rips of the DVD and BR of the movie sent to the reviewers and other peoples for the purpose of reviewing the movie. Mostly the copies have watermarks or messages. Some times some of the film sequences are in Black and White.

Type:- Region 5
Label:- R5
R5 are rip of the DVD of the movies available in the region 5 which consist of the Indian subcontinent, Africa, North Korea, Russia and Mongolia.
Note:- It is suggested that the audio quality of the R5 prints is not that good because the audio is synced later from some secondary source. But my experience with R5 rips has been good and i was not able to find many difference between the audio, so i would suggest its OK to download R5 rips.

Type:- HDTV or DS rip
Label:- HDTV, TVrip or DTHrip
This are rips captured from the analog or DTH sources.

Type:- DVD and Blu-Ray rips
Label:- DVDrip and BDrips
These are the best quality rips as the are ripped from the official DVD and Blu-Rays of the movie.
Note:- In recent times the DVD and Blu-Rays appear online very quickly so if you are not in a great hurry to see the movie, i would suggest to wait for this version of the movie.

There are some more version but this are the most popular/common ones and i would suggest you to stick with this versions.

After a long break, I write this post in my blog. Hope you liked it!