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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Re-encoding with lower bitrate. 99% of the people won't be able to tell the difference.

Transcoding like that is very heavily frowned upon. A scene group would not risk their reputation like that.

I suspect what they are referring to there is the process of remuxing the file and removing extra audio streams, ie. a BD50 BluRay of "They Shall Not Grow Old" comes in at 20GB with two audio streams, DTS-HD and Dolby Digital. The remux of that BluRay comes in at 16GB and has an identical bit-rate on the video stream, but the Dolby Digital audio stream has been removed, as well as the menu graphics (though this would not apply to a WEB stream).

No its not, look at piratebay. By far the most downloaded versions are 1.5-3GB 1080p rips, or much smaller 720p ones. And on some 55" screen, they are just fine

The files on TPB generally aren't the original scene releases. They get transcoded to lower qualities by other people for the masses who don't care.

Depends on the release.

The scene releases are usually the highest quality possible released in exclusively closed private trackers - sometimes only paid accounts are accepted as a member (if at all).

Everything else probably 95% you see in the wild are transcoded to lower bitrate and stripped out of all the extra files in the container (sub/multiple audio stream/highbitrate audio) to smalled files - because thats what most people want:

Small Video easily playable on a regular screen.

Yes, but then why do they need to reverse engineer anything? Can't they use a capture card?

They can, it's called "webrip" then (also in the article).

Creates an obvious problem though.

What is this "obvious problem"?

Aside from the quality loss due to re-encoding - which should be identical to the loss encountered when capturing digital video and audio output, assuming the capture is done correctly - I fail to see anything "obvious".

I assume it's per stream identifiable information added by the stream provider, making the identity of the ripper traceable

Sorry - clearly wasn't thinking straight - their alternative approach has this same issue (and having now read the article! - They do plan around this)

Presumably this is still present in the encoded stream they decrypt. I believe the way around this is by prepaid accounts etc and throwaway emails. High end piracy like this is big business. Correct me if I’m wrong about the IDs in the stream though.

Edit: I just saw parents reply. It took a while to type this out on my phone :/

You can only record in real time.

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