High Def x264 Movie Standards
You could have seen many releases entitled as “x264” lately. But what does this really mean? I noticed many people still don’t know anything about this new movie standard, so here’s a special scene NFO which sets the rules for groups releasing new movies in x264. You can download the whole NFO here (thx Matej).
~Intro~
The High Definition x264 encoding scene has the goal of creating rips of HDDVD and BluRay
sources that can be played by the majority of end users. Specific hardware (other than
something higher then a mid-range Pent 4) should never be required to play releases.
The goal is for these to be burnable to a DVD media source, playable on an HTPC. We are
not releasing these to be re-authored onto HDDVD or BluRay media. These rules will be
constantly updated to adjust for new audio formats that are playable.
~Previous Releases~
These audio rules do not apply to previous releases, and propering for those reasons will
not be tolerated. Groups who have released eac3 in the past have the option to repack, but
this isn't mandatory. Common sense rules such as cropping are properable.
~General~
1) RAR/SFV/NFO needed.
2) Rar's can be 50mb, 100mb or 150mb. Use your best judgment.
3) Final file size must be DVD5 or DVD9 Size
- The release should be as close as possible to full size
- Large percentage differences are properable.
4) DVD9 should be used only in cases of long movies, or high action movies.
- Propering a release that is borderline is not valid.
5) 2x DVD5 is NOT allowed.
6) Releases should be packed into mkv container.
7) NFO must contain information on Audio and Video Bitrate.
8 ) We recommend putting keys used to decrypt in NFO.
9) BluRay and HDDVD Sources dupe each other.
10) Suggested Directory Format (not a properable reason):
Movie.Name.Year.<DVD5/DVD9>.720p.<HDDVD/BluRay>.x264.<PROPER/REPACK>-GROUP
11) NO intros, outros, betweenos, or any other form of defacement of the film will be
tolerated.
12) Credits must not be removed, but can be encoded at a lower bitrate provided they don't
contain any scenes (bloopers, story, etc).
13) A sample roughly 60 seconds in length is required It must be cut from the final release
and not encoded separately.
14) Multi-language subtitles cannot be used as a basis for a dupe
15) Subtitles are to be MUXED into the mkv container, but MAY NOT be burned in to the video
stream. "Subs" directories are also forbidden.
Document continues in the NFO file linked above.
Comments(38)
thanks for the info, i knew all this but the last day I see some releases like that: “Doom Extended Edition 2005 DVDRip x264-MrQ” that are only 1,36 GB in Xvid sections
Yeah, I would like to see more HQ x264 rips. Not only from HD DVD or Bluray, but also from “normal” DVDs! While these releases wouldn’t play on most standalone DVD&Xvid players (clear con), they would offer superior quality for laptop or desktop users (clear pro). There were some really good DVD rips of a group called “optivid” on thepiratebay (featuring full DVD resolution of 720 pixels width). Their StarWars 3 release offered great video quality!
How I despise 720p. Cant play it =/
god damn! I have 1.7TB hdd space on my comp and it is nearly full…so I hope they will still rls the “low” quality rlses so I dont have to put all my money on HDD space…
Can’t play it on a standalone player.
I love 720p even on my 40″ 1080p LCD. But, where I live prices for DVD9 are much higher than 2xDVD5. It’s a bit disappointing that the groups don’t like 2xDVD5. Luckily, there are great MKV splitter apps out there.
And newsgroups are flooded with h264 encoded 720p movies… Tons of good movies – old and new – are up for grabs.
@st0rm
maybe you should delete some of your gay porn to get some extra space
“13) A sample roughly 60 seconds in length is required It must be cut from the final release and not encoded separately.”
i always wonderd how groups cut their sample , all the movie splitting apps iv found re-encode it
VirtualDub?!
an old version crashed alot, the new version seems quite nice, but i still cant figure out how to save a sample with it
@dumbass
Erasing porn is against scene rules
ah found it, segmented avi, nice
x264 = avc is all that really needs to be said lol
@assman
yeah, coz lack of real woman is not ‘properable’ on the scene
@qwerty
720p is 720 pixels height, not width
DVD quality is 480p (720×480 on NTSC)
so, no mather what, the max quality you can get from a DVD is 480p
1080p is too much, you require a big processor 2.8Ghz+ and is only appreciated on BIG screens like proyectors.
720p is the middle ground, better than DVD and more cpu conservative when decoding.
ladies and gentlemen, we are now, on the verge of a new phase on media distribution… remember early divx? those .asf movies?
Jeez…I hate these rared movies. Put a movie into an archive is absolutly useless and simply anoing, plus it requires twice more room on the hard drive, and if you by accident drag’n drop files from winrar, then count three times size of the movie file.
Rediculous “rule”.
I got to 6 and got bored. I don’t really care I’m too pissed to give a fuck and this is just bland as fuck and is only written to cover yourselves. Fuck the rest I’d rather not know and get sued than to know and get sued. Keep up the work. When does a new movie come out. I’m running low on new material and this is getting shit unless you like shit comedies from at last 3 years ago. If the quality is shit just upload it because it’s gotta’ be better than sitting here bored as fuck when my only salvation is tv shows off of bitsoup. which is a cool site. but good luck trying to join because most of you won’t. You can even buy credit which is cool because you don’t even have to upload. Yes I’m a leeching bastard but how many of me are there in the world. Seeding sucks when you have to wait daays to clear your ratio. I just can’t be bothered my team lost 3 nil and I thought I’d take it out on you. In truthful terms. Shit how long have I been writing this it’s starting to sound like a novel. Thanks alot to all you pirates out there. You rock and we would never be here unless you suplied something we like. So keep up the excellent work and leave this website to copy reviews and take all of the credit for nothing. Bye. I wiss miss you. Not
@Xuy
I agree.
Rar’s are a waste of space, my solution to that is as follows:
1. find a torrent with the phats unpacked and seed it
2. download the rars and the second it finishes, stop seeding, unpack and delete the crappy rar’s.
regarding option number 2. YES I know it hurts the torrents, but I dont give a shit about those pesky rar’s. while I seed unpacked torrents, I dont care what happens to the rar torrents. its a useless practice that only wastes space and well.. its useless.
I know rar’s come with crc checking of the files inside it and all that, but its a useless practice on torrents. the torrent clients does the crc checking by itself and it wont stop before all the downloaded pieces are complete and matches the .torrent file’s crc list.
@dblmask
a good video card will not burden the processor
@Xyu & Cheng Bang
yeah, torrent clients checks the file being downloaded but what if it fails? you’ll have the pleasure of downloading a huge amount of data again!
rars are stupid and should be removed. not everyone has an unreliable connection.
Rars are good because you get get different parts of one release from multiple sources. MAJOR PLUS. Also try putting a 4.5GB iso or mkv on a FAT32 formatted ipod… If you are that tight for hard drive space that you can’t spare 5-10GB TEMPORARILY to extract something then buy a bigger drive, burn some stuff off or (as posted above) delete some porn.
bit confused… why “Releases should be packed into mkv container”? Seems strange dumping MPEG-4 codecs into a non-MPEG-4 container. wouldn’t think that has enough support from hardware manufacturers.
I love x264 releases and watch them on my non-HD tv.
One thing that is incredibly stupid, WHY NO DVD5×2 ?!!! That’s retarded when there’s 700mb x2 releases for all xvids why not let the same happen for x264 so we can at least burn the goddamn movies to dvd.
I’ve got Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut (8gig) and Braveheart (8 gig) using up space on my torrent drives because they’re too big for DVD5’s and Dual layer dvds cost too much.
@Naj
no, you wouldnt have to re-download a huge file if it fails. any decent torrent client should allow you to run a forced crc check of the torrent and the faulty parts of the torrent would be detected and re-downloaded. the parts scheduled for re-download shouldnt be big, a single torrent block ranges from 32kB to 4096kB (thats 4MB). as I see it, the only reason for this to happen would be a faulty HD, if I would start getting corrupt torrent downloads the first thing I would do would be replacing the harddrive I saved the file on.
@Mr.Rar
I have 2.2TB of hd space. while Im wont run out of hd space anytime soon, I just dont see the point of saving two copies of the same files. do you keep the rar’s for youre fav 1080p movies?
I just dont see the point of spending twice as much hd space than I would have to just to keep the rars, and when it comes to HD material, free hd space just “vanishes” if you know what I mean. HD movies are big..
right now Ive got about 900GB of HD movies stored. do you really mean that I should spend another 900GB of storage just to keep the rars?
While i’m a big fan of the MKV container on the PC i kinda wish the scene would release HD videos in MP4 container that would play back on the PS3 or the Xbox360 (after the forthcoming update).
rars are for the scene so they can send between topsites, they dont have to start over if something goes wrong and more people can race the same release, useful for users also if only one part is corrupt just get that part and no need to dl the whole thing again.
single file avis are for p2p were the file is split up into even smaller parts by the p2p app and causes disk fragmentation.
and anyway complaining about stuff you get for free is kinda stupid.
@OmegaRED
Google for mkvmergue GUI.
It’s a really nice tool for matroska videos. It has file splitting, so you can burn your DVD9 files in 2 DVD5 after using this tool.
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/
TooDrunk2write you northern monkey, man-u are shit, like all limey teams and the sheep-loving Liverpool losers/scum.
Also, those who release according to scene rules pack their shit in “the extra” .rar files because you can add the file_id.diz and site commercials there, if I remember correctly. This was the case 5-10 years ago (there were also .arj and .ace in .zip files before .rar was invented or something along those lines) It’s an oldskool scene rule and I have a strong feeling it ain’t changing anytime soon.
“Multi-language subtitles cannot be used as a basis for a dupe”
why subtitles can’t be used sometimes is really hard to get subtitles for some movies… can any1 explain me that?
Sorry for my english!
as i understand it,it just means a multi sub release doesnt nuke a single language release
that damn stupid zix trojan $hithead.. nice try
I’d like to see The.720p.x264.TV.Releasing.Standards.2007, if anyone could find them.
Most of the rules are pretty sound. I especially applaud the banning of hardsubs.
What I just don’t get is that stupid atavism of chopping everything up in rars. This means that you can’t preview, the files aren’t shareable across networks, and torrents will dry out fast because everybody does the sensible thing, unrar them as soon as the download completes and delete the rars. @Mr Rar: “you get get different parts of one release from multiple sources” with _every_ filesharing client, that’s what chunks are for. Error correction ditto. Wake up, the times of usenet are over.
And why force the mkv container over mp4?
And why did they have to squat the name of a video codec for this standard? (x264 is an opensource implementation of H.264, arguably the best of the popular video codecs around.) Now everything encoded in x264 will be confused with, and measured against a profile for HD rips. It’s like saying “everything encoded with xvid must have ac3 audio”. I would hate to see releases propered just because they have “x264″ in their name and don’t fit their arbitrary rules.
@dblmask
Qwerty said full dvd resolution, which in fact is 720 pixels width, and not height. He wasn’t, unlike you, talking about 720p.
FYI you do not need to unpack the RARs, you can play the video from inside the RAR. XBMC support this by default and nbzplayer from news.
To get WMP and other player to support this you just need a source filter for RARs.
The best thing about RARs is they contain the checksum, so you test all your RARs every month and when there is suddenly error, you know to return the HDD for warranty.
That is the *only* way to know if your HDD is failing, SMART, chkdsk and others are very unreliable and 99.9% times say everything is perfect when the RAR test says you got errors appearing.
Raring the files is not stupid, useless, etc…
The main reason is the original distribution mode from usenet. You simply can’t post a 700mb file in a single post on usenet, to say nothing of a 4+ Gigs. You _have to_ split it.
Rars also have fringe benefits : if the torrent is composed of rared files, most of the time it’s been created from the original scene source, whereas unpacked torrent can contain, oh well, anything really. (of course a conscienscious faker could create a torrent containing rars, but they seldom go through the trouble, lazy bastards as they are)
Of course it’s annoying to unpack the rars, but really, it’s not that much of a burden, and after all, the cost of the file deserves a _little_ effort