p2pnet.net News:- Music downloading has been all the rage nice Napster brought it to the main stream. However, one of the latest fads to begin to attract more attention and press has been the downloading of television episodes from peer-to-peer networks. This phenomena is more popular in Europe and elsewhere than in the United States, due to the fact that popular shows such as ‘24′ or ‘Lost’ do not air until months or even years after they air in America, if they are broadcast at all.

Newcomers to the “scene” (a word I am using very loosely in this article) may find many terms and words they are not fimilar with. We will explain some of the them and what they mean in this article.

Formats
TV episodes will generally be available in one of a few formats. The most common tends to be Xvid or DivX encoded .avi files. These are compressed formats that allow for the file to be much smaller than it would be if uncompressed. MPEG-1 – or analog captures – used to be the most common format in the “scene” but nowadays higher quality digital captures are found much more often.

Name of the Groups: LOL, LOKi, FoV, SFM, Fanta, CTU, CRIMSON, and FTV

These names will often be attached to the files. They identify who was responsible for the “rip”. This allows downloaders to have an idea of what kind of quality the rip is going to be. Some are shortened versions of the names. For example FoV = Future of Vision, and SFM = SciFi Maniacs. LOL is one of the most active groups – with their captures of many of the more popular shows being some of the most wildly distributed. LOKi has also become quite popular of late, capping many of the popular shows that LOL hasn’t. FTV was once one of the most common tags you would see on rips. They do MPEG-1 analog captures, and have become less popular in the last year or so.

Types of “rips”
Here are the most common tags you will see on TV episodes, discribing what kind of “rip” the episode is. HR-HDTV = High Resolution High Definition TV, HDTV – High Definition TV, PDTV – Pure Digital TV, and DSRIP – Digital Sateilittle Rip. The HDTV label is given to releases that are both purely digital, AND are broadcast at either 720p (60fps) or 1080i (30fps). The PDTV label is given to releases with purely digital sources with direct digital stream extraction such as via a DVB-{S,T} pci card or a HDTV card. This includes non-HDTV resolution digital transmissions such as the Enhanced Digital TV format used by Fox that is captured with an HDTV card. This does NOT include a captures from a digital source with an intermediate analog conversion, e.g. a digital satellite receiver box with S-Video out to a capture card. HR.HDTV is HDTV source (1920*1088,29.97i or 1280*720,59.94p), 960×528 WS resolution, and untouched AC3 audio.

These HR-HDTV captures are the highest quality and newest format to be found. It’s no good to download these and watch them on a standard TV as it can not handle the high resolutions used by this format. They are for watching on a high definition TV or computer monitor set to a high resolution. Older slower PC’s may have trouble playing these. They have begun showing up at some TV torrent sites, and ED2K hash link sites. It has even became possible to find some movies released in this HR-HDTV format.

Cory Higgins – P2PForums

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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