A group of “warez” crews devoted to releasing TV shows on the BitTorrent file sharing network has published a new document about multimedia standards to be used in their SD (Standard Definition) releases. 2012 brings a fundamental switch from Xvid to the newer x264 format, the “elite” pirates group decided.
The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 document states that “x264 has become the most advanced video codec over the past few years”, a coded that compared to XviD “is able to provide higher quality and compression at greater SD resolution”.
Video streams encoded with the x264 open source library will be compliant with the H.264/MPEG4 standard, ie one of the formats of choice for high definition video encoding. The maturity and reliability of x264 is proved by the many awards the standard won and by the fact that the content industry itself used it in its commercial releases.
The warez groups that decided to switch from Xvid to x264 include ASAP, BAJSKORV, C4TV, D2V, DiVERGE, FTP, KYR, LMAO, LOL, MOMENTUM, SYS, TLA, YesTV, and they praise the new codec for bringing “quality control back to SD releases”.
“There are many standalone players/streamers such as TviX, Popcorn Hour, WDTV HD Media Player, Boxee, Xtreamer, PS3, Xbox 360, iPad and HDTVs that can playback H264 and AAC encapsulated in MP4”, the groups state, seemingly foretelling the backfire they could get from such a radical technology switch.
And some backfire they got: a loud group of “warez users” didn’t accept the x264 switch with ease, highlighting their inability to play MP4-contained video streams with their usual home video devices like DVD players. To satisfy the Xvid-only media aficionados, a group of pirates emerged willing to do the boring transcoding work in their stead.