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Blu-ray & HD DVD & Video Downloads Wesley Novack on 19 Jan 2007

Pirates don’t care about HD DVD movie rips

123 Responses to “Pirates don’t care about HD DVD movie rips”

1. on 19 Jan 2007 at 3:08 pm 1.Benito said …

   I would say the biggest deterrent is most likely the time of download. Maybe when the internet2 is available and we a 24GB download won’t take days it would be doable. However I believe if you were not the typical guy downloading to watch movies in your house but one that resells them in a flea market or something it would be worth it to exercise the resources required to complete the process. Once its possible to burn to an HD DVD that is…

   Good stuff maing!

2. on 19 Jan 2007 at 3:48 pm 2.Dave said …

   There is always the novelty aspect of downloading your first HD DVD rip. But I agree there are many complications that could prevent you from enjoying your download.

3. on 19 Jan 2007 at 4:35 pm 3.Jason said …

   Um… High Definition DVDs? What is the purpose. Are these DVDs popular with the new films that are coming out?

   Those are the questions I want to know….

   

   Your article was okay… I don;t know if it appeals to persons that don’t know much about DVDs…

4. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:51 pm 4.Danners said …

   Point 8: Bullcrap, I’ve downloaded many 1080p and 720p films compressed with WMV to around 5gb per film, not only is the result very respectable (certainly in comparison to your standard 480p dvd rip) but it also plays great on my 5 year old PC.

   HD-DVD EVO downloads certainly pointless at this point in time, but HD video content in general most certainly is not. If I ever download a film or video, I will always get it in HD if it’s available.

5. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:51 pm 5.manwith1nipple said …

   yes, there is SOME novelty in downloading your first HDDVD.

   OTOH, i’d like the ability to take the HDDVD and make my own 720p or 480p or PSP-able version, which, if it weren’t for the copy-protection parts of the DCMA, would be legal under Fair Use Sony vs Universal ruling (as long as it’s always under your control)

6. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:53 pm 6.Wesley Novack said …

   Hi Danners, thanks for your comment regarding #8. I will look into the WMV compression of HD video. But is it any better than DVD or are you wasting your time messing with a compressed HD video file?

7. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:57 pm 7.bob said …

   alt.binaries.hdtv

   NOOOObody wants HD movie downloads… lol

8. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:59 pm 8.John said …

   No i personaly would not download 20g of an HD movie but i would support those who do, any way to stick it to the man i support. If it makes them lose money and keeps money in the average joes pocket i support it.

9. on 19 Jan 2007 at 6:59 pm 9.Affinity said …

   Have you ever heard of x264? Thats pretty effective compression that keeps most of the quality. Those rips are very popular at HD sites/trackers.

   A 4.4 GB rip would be much better that a standard DVD.

10. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:00 pm 10.Shawn said …

    RE: “Effective HD compression is not available”

    No effective way to compress HD Video? The chinese are exploring a red laser standard based on h264 (That means HD on 9GB DVDs). wmv9 (aka VC-1) and h264 were the only way to get HD content on the computer, until very recently. Both codecs do a considerably better job than the native MPEG2 used on the HD DVD disc.

    Many HD rips of TV shows are available using xvid, h264, and (to a lesser extent) wmv9. They all look spectacular, and they all exhibit significant size savings.

    More research was needed on this point.

11. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:01 pm 11.Danners said …

    Wesley: The films I have seen in 1080p, even compressed to 5gb have looked better to me than a normal DVD or DVD rip. I only watch them on 24″ widescreen monitor so sitting back I don’t notice compression artifacts so much, but if you scrutinize the picture or play it on a nice 42″lcd then I’m sure it wouldn’t look quite as nice.

    It’s certainly comparable, best thing to do is go grab yourself a sample and check it for yourself.

12. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:03 pm 12.Wesley Novack said …

    Hi guys, I see a lot of input regarding #8. I will certainly need to have another look at the compressed HD video content that is available out there. Thanks for all the comments guys!

13. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:05 pm 13.experipop said …

    Technology is *always* moving forward. If you think “DVD” is going to be the standard for the next 10 to 20 years, then you would probably be sadly mistaken. HD is here, probably here to stay, and will only gain popularity. “DVD” will be phased out eventually, and what will be the new standard? As of now, we can only speculate that HDDVD or Blu-Ray will be the standard. Once the whole format battle is over and done with and we have a victor, the popularity of highdef video discs will boom. This, along with the coming boom in popularity of *legal* downloadable high-quality videos, and the force of technology progression in general, up/downstream speeds will eventually increase, average hard disk space will increase (it has always been steadily increasing). HDDVD/Blu-ray is the future, and once the surge of popularity begins, it will only dictate the path and speed of improvement of the standards in everything else. I know your article is about “now” or at least “this year,” but just know that your article will probably be laughed at in its ridiculousness in the next decade.

14. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:07 pm 14.Andrew Ferguson said …

    All of these are really valid reasons. Personally? I think the quality difference already speaks for itself.

    You see dozens of 700MB XVID dvd rips for every ‘FULL-DVD’ rip of any movie up there. Pirates have already spoken with their downloads, and they feel the lower quality is worth the benefits of faster downloads, easier storage, and easier seeding.

    I imagine that some people will enjoy them. There will probably be a lot more watch-and-delete pirates with HD-DVD than with normal.

    We won’t be able to get a clear idea for at least a few months, but as a starting point this is really good.

15. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:09 pm 15.Wesley Novack said …

    Thanks for your constructive comment Andrew!

16. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:10 pm 16.jimmy said …

    This article is bullshit. Sorry, but you just don’t understand how digital piracy works. If it can be done and is in questionable legal territory, people will do it.

17. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:11 pm 17.MarcMe said …

    What a load of crap! What market are you catering to? Smart people aren’t going to pay overpriced amounts for HDTV content. Period! Yet you may have a point: perhaps 20gigs worth of some bad content isn’t worth downloading, but that’s up to the individual to decide. I call bullshit: This article is a fake; and though it says little of value in itself, it does say a lot about Digg.

18. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:17 pm 18.speedo said …

    you’re an idiot with clearly too much time on your hands.

19. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:24 pm 19.Wesley Novack said …

    Everyone that submitted a constructive comment, thank you for posting.

    Of course I realize that HD DVD rips will be pirated in some amount. This article was meant to illustrate some of the troubles that pirates will face or items that would deter them. I never claimed that “no one will pirate HD DVD rips”.

20. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:25 pm 20.Homer said …

    I agree that HD-DVD rips will be a very small part of the P2P scene for a while. At some point we will have enough storage and bandwidth to make it no big deal and then it will explode. I remember having hard disks that could only hold a few CDs worth of data total and 14.4k dialup connection that downloading a few meg was long and painful. Mt how things have changes since the olden days

21. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:26 pm 21.MarcMe said …

    Wow Mr.Banana-Hammock! Nice reply! I’m an idiot with too much time on my hands. How about we focus on what has been said here. oh wait! Let’s not, I’m an idiot…sorry I forgot. Dismiss my comments.

22. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:30 pm 22.Affinity said …

    HD’s will get bigger, HD-DVD burners will come, and Connections will get faster.

    So its just a matter of time.

23. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:32 pm 23.MarcMe said …

    Amen Affinity! Amen!

24. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:35 pm 24.Allen said …

    It doesn’t matter today because the market penetration is too low. It will matter in 5+ years from now when everyone has an HDTV and whatever player is around.

25. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:39 pm 25.Me said …

    HD DVD Porn…. sums it up for ya’?

26. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:41 pm 26.hhh said …

    Wow, you must have done no research at all.
    1)HD Video file sizes are too large- These files may be large, but consumer space is extremely cheap. Two major companies have just released 1tb drives, and 200gb drives can be purchased for as low s $20 (I picked up 3 of these).

    2) Take too long to download- Not at all. I can max out my line downloading HD DVD rips. I have seen the overall speed on these torrents over 40 megabytes a second (not bits, bytes!). This will only take a day or so on a 8mbit line which is common in the united states, and 100mbit lines in other countries are plentiful.

    3)Seeding Can be unattractive- Sort of with number two, foreign countries have tons of bandwidth to spare, but most of these users are probably in the US. Seeding will take a while, which is the only downside, but it is also a great upside too. People will want to seed it back, so they leave the torrent open for a long time. This will allow others to get it and help seed too.

    4) Unable to be burned- True, I cannot argue with this.

    5) Portability and compatibility- Have you heard of HTPC’s? These have become more and more common every day, and with falling hardware prices, many many people have them. Just copy it to the hdd or stream it from another pc. All HDTV’s have HDMI which can be converted from DVI, or to component out (from the video card) to connect the analogue signal.

    6) Most pirates do not, but also most pirates stick to 700mb rips that are way to compressed. People who want true HD will have the hardware, or already do. HDTV has be avaiable to download for a long time, so many people already have powerful systems to play these files.

    7) HD software- Come on, if people are pirating these movie files, what do you think is going to stop the from pirating a program too? If its available for free, people will download and install it in a second.

    Effective HD compression is not here- Wrong again. X264 is extremely good at doing this. Many movies can be compressed down to a dvd-9 or even a dvd-5 and still look 100 times better than the regular DVD. Plus, the EVO files CAN be compressed. I have personally seen 3 movies converted to dvd-5 x264 encodes, and they look wonderful.

    9) Little to no titles- True, but more are coming each week, and they look great.

    10) Alternate formats- The people who are getting these HD rips are going for quality, not quantity. If they have there system set up correctly, there is a huge difference between a 700mb rip and these 20gb hd dvds. The colors and details are so much more in hdtv. There is a demand, and it is growing fast for HD rips.

27. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:41 pm 27.home built said …

    I saw today someone hooked up an Xbox HD DVD, to their system. So today I tried. It works, but you need a fast system, Power DVD. It will not work with a DVI connected display, but with an DVI to VGA, it does. So for 199.00 for the drive, and 99 for power DVD, I have an HD DVD player.

28. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:43 pm 28.MarcMe said …

    HD DVD Porn Bah! It’s about the quality of the orgasm, not what causes it. I’d rather a better zitcom on VCH that some crap show on HDTV.

29. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:45 pm 29.MarcMe said …

    And hhh, awesome post! You are 100% correct across the board!

30. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:52 pm 30.EvilUmpir said …

    I think that most of the comments all have good points. HDDVD ripping won’t catch on right away, but I’m glad that it’s been cracked and the ability is out there, but it just isn’t practical as of yet. Giving a physical copy (on HDDVD or just an external HD) to friends who live nearby can work, but not over the net anytime soon, at least uncompressed. With the right encryption (which I know very little about) it could be much more useful in the short term, and like Affinity said, with time and technology and bandwidth upgrades, it will become much more practical. These are just the first steps into the next generation of video. Without these guys and what they are doing, we would never get to the next step.

31. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:54 pm 31.chrispen said …

    from what I’ve heard DivX’s HD codec is supposed to be quite good. Also I’ve been seeing a few DVD players that support it, so that could be something to look forward to. I also think from what DivX said you should be able to fit at least two HD DivX movies onto a regular DVD. I could easily see this as being a possible future in video downloads if the right people decided to adopt HD DivX.

32. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:58 pm 32.bauhaus said …

    I learned a lesson in 1995. Actually it was a few years later than that, but it was based on an incorrect assessment made at that time. My nephew was showing me a new music format called mp3. I scoffed that even though it sounded great, the file size was much to big compared to midi recordings. So, in addition to taking up too much space on our 200 MB hard drives, they’ll take forever to download over our 28.8K modems! Silly kid. Well, we all know what happened between then and now. To me, MP3 then sounds an awful lot like HD-DVD right now.

33. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:59 pm 33.LotsOfPeople said …

    Media Center + XBox 360 extender + 60″ hidef TV = 1080i playback from any backed up hd-dvd NATIVELY, you don’t need any conversion at all, it will simply play the transport stream if you have a directshow filter on the MCE PC. 1080i will even by most good quality HD TV’s in 1080p after framebuffering (1080i 60->1080p 30). Not only is this really easy to do but guess what lots of people are doing it… In addition download speed.. hmm lets see with consumer cable connections now, for example my 30 meg connection and a 20gig movie… thats 1.6 hrs….. But wait your saying bittorrent right… and it will take far longer and no seeds and no reliable connections. blah blah blah.. wait no one in the world uses newzbin and newsgroups with dedicated bandwidth servers right?

34. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:00 pm 34.dani said …

    1. A 750GB HDD will hold 37 movies.
    2. A 20GB file is roughly 30 times larger than a 700MB one. 8Mb bandwith is roughly 30 times 256kb. People have been downloading 700MB xvids on 256kb pipes, chances are they’ll do that to 20GB files on 8Mbps - bandwith IS becoming cheaper and more available these days. 20GB/8Mb is some 6 hours, that’s 1/4 days (if you need the plural).
    3. see 2.
    4. The resulting file is not yet able to be burned to disc - let’s leave this for two months.
    5. I suppose pirates are geeky.
    6. That goes for the legit discs too. There will be pirating of HDDVD in the measure there is a market for the “real” discs.
    7. Um, I doubt pirates ever buy software…
    8-10. Already answered.

35. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:02 pm 35.Roger Strong said …

    Copying a DVD isn’t as bad as you think, but for the most part I agree with you.

    My new machine came with an HD DVD player and software. It came with an HD DVD of “The Bourne Supremacy”. Alas, my new high definition monitor does not support the HDCP content protection.

    The available monitor choices that *did* support HDCP, didn’t support 1080p. So to view High Definition movies, I had to give up the ability to view them in high definition. Since the system was used primarily for programming, I went for the higher definition monitor rather than a lower definition High Definition compatible one.

    (I’ve downloaded a couple of HD news clips - a Shuttle launch and a tour of the space station. They play on my system, and dang, are they amazing.)

    I can now download “The Bourne Supremacy”. It’s available on Usenet as (I believe) an HD cable rip. It’s probably available by now as an HD DVD rip. I can play it on my computer. I can save the pieces to three DVD-DL discs - and reload them back on my computer and an uninterrupted movie later.

    There’s no ethical reason not to; I already own the movie in HD. If the people selling the disc have no qualms about selling it “defective by design” without warning, then I have no qualms about bypassing the defect.

    Still, I don’t plan to download it. While its nowhere near as much hassle (at least for me) as you suggest, it’s still enough not to bother.

    But then that goes for *purchasing* “defective by design” movies too. I own an HD DVD player, but I won’t be buying any movies.

36. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:03 pm 36.keys said …

    “Consumers still love their DVD resolution!”

    i don’t know if i am a consumer, but i certainly am not happy with dvd resolution now that better is available.
    your article is about hd-dvd uncompressed or whatever.
    movies labelled HDRip are often 1024x* or 960x* xvid.

    this is ideal for today’s technology even though it doesn’t seem like people care to catch up and release a lot of these.

    however the only reason i am watching 24 this season is because of rips labelled HR which are 960x*
    they are clearly amazing looking and i don’t mind double the filesize.

37. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:08 pm 37.Tom said …

    you are all also forgeting

    as technology improves, and net connections get faster.
    so too will the speed at which you can download the smaller, compressed and (imho) ‘good’ quality 700mb movies.

    minutes? seconds maybe? it’d be faster then walking to the local blockbuster.

38. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:10 pm 38.agloco said …

    atm they dont have the technology but i think sooner theyll find a way espcially in Asia where kind of normal to see dvds on their streets…

    -P
    http://myagloconetwork.blogspot.com

39. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:23 pm 39.Bryan said …

    Well, your reasoning is mostly correct. But it boils down to one thing: the infrastructure to support the file size isn’t there yet.

    The mp3 scene used to have lower audio quality standards because of bandwidth issues. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that they made the jump to 192kbps. And now it’s 192kbps VBR, which isn’t really lower quality, but is a smaller file and had a lot of backing because of the bandwidth required to move the massive amounts of releases from site to site.

    There actually was a time when everybody was doing direct DVD copies of movies instead of DivX/XviD/etc., but the bandwidth and download times put an end to that.

    However, with Time Warner’s recent upgrade to 10mbps residential cable, I don’t think we’re far from seeing demand for HD movies. Give it another year.

40. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:29 pm 40.Dibbler said …

    Cyberlink_PowerDVD_6.5_HD-DVD is already pirated

41. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:32 pm 41.Dibbler said …

    and I have to add that here in good old sweden a lot of users have 100Mbit download/10Mbit upload
    cost: 45$ US per month

    they will be downloading HD

42. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:35 pm 42.keys said …

    to bryan

    “It wasn’t until just a few years ago that they made the jump to 192kbps.”

    if a few years is 1999, then ok.

    baby one more time album was one of the last in 160 and that was around december 1998.

    by 2004 or whenever the scene switched to vbr, size did not matter. it was about sound quality.

43. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:39 pm 43.subcorpus said …

    hmm …
    i dont have a Mbit connection …
    but i’d still wanna DL some HD stuff …
    i’d take days … yeah … i know … hehe ..

44. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:41 pm 44.Someone said …

    Took me 15 hours to download @ ~450KB/s average down, ~850 KB/second up, + a few hours more to seed to at least 2 u/d ratio.

    DVD rips are often take longer than this. Sure, you can’t do this if you have a crappy connection, but if you have dial up you don’t try to watch shit on youtube do you?

    Transferring it about is no problem, keep it on a local file server, and you can stream it to any pc on the LAN.

    You don’t need a super pc to play this stuff, anyone with a modern pc would be fine.

45. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:51 pm 45.joe said …

    Most of these talking points are irrelevant, mainly because the exact same problems existed when DVDs originally came out. In another year or two these won’t be issues. And a couple more years after that, the industry will come out with a new ‘must have’ standard with all sorts of ‘innovations’ and the cycle will repeat itself.

    I’ve always wondered why we have to repay for the content every time a new format comes out. Seems to me that, at this point we ought to be able to pay for the content once and then, if interested pay for tech upgrades as they come.

46. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:52 pm 46.moose09876 said …

    I love 720p. It will play on basically anything, looks sooooooooo much better than DVD and not much worse than 1080p. File size? Seriously. 20+GB for 1080p. 15+GB for 1080i.

47. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:55 pm 47.Chris Taylor said …

    The advantage of HD is not in the ability to download of upload it but eventually in having it as SOURCE material for better quality conversion TO that 1.4gig xvid file (most good release are 2cd release)

    I would love an xvid file at 720p and 1.4 - 2.0gig - as good as the original hell no will it be a lot prettier than the files we are getting now ? YES and HELL YES

    it will take time though. once the hardware is easier to get (cheaper) and we have software for transcoding these evo files things will get very nice indeed

48. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:58 pm 48.Jase said …

    I’m surprised, among all the talk about #7, nobody mentioned the absolutely free Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/). Not only does it do HD playback, it does it exceedingly well.

    On top of that, you can download CoreAVC alpha for free, and it works even better than the default codec that’s in there. Pair that with a nice video card, such as a high-end nVidia like the 7800GTX, and you’ve got smooth running HD video, no matter what the size. You could go super-HD, and I’m sure these cards would be able to run it. Even my laptop can run smooth HD without a good graphics card with CoreAVC and CCCP.

    As for compression, like everyone said, x264 is wonderful. I’ve been watching anime series encoded in x264 - it’s a blessing that these files are actually no larger than current, SD files. In general, a DivX compression of an SD-resolution file is around 200-250 MB, whereas the x264 in 720p can be compressed to 140 MB, and still look better. However, it looks best at around the same size, 200-250 MB. I can only imagine 1080p video at 50-100 more megabytes, which is a trifle more to download per file if you’re downloading a series, and even less of a trifle if it’s a movie.

    Oh, and speak of the devil, you can connect your computer to an HDTV and watching full screen video on it! No HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player required - because technically, the video isn’t in any disc format - it’s just video! DRM? Hah! It’s got the same amount of protection as any normal video file, because that’s exactly what it is.

    If I have to download anything, it will never be a direct rip in HD-DVD or Blu-Ray format, considering I never have any plans to purchase a player or burner in the next year or two. I’ll always get something encoded to a more standard and compressed video format, such as x264. That way, I can just watch it like a normal video, on my HDTV that’s hooked up to this computer.

    For the non-believers who don’t think that you can cheaply hook up your computer to an HDTV via DVI-to-HDMI or any other type of cable, think again:

    http://www.ehdmi.com/

    They’re the most wonderful place. I bought a 35-foot DVI-to-HDMI cable, and now I watch all my videos on the 42″ HDTV instead of my monitor, which can’t do anything past 1600×1200.

    And I’m currently downloading some files that amount to 6GB - far larger than most HD videos will be, I’m sure. That’s going to take about ten hours. I won’t mind downloading an HD video, and I’m sure nobody else will.

49. on 19 Jan 2007 at 8:58 pm 49.Social Twist » Blog Archive » Negatives to Pirating HD DVDs said …

    […] Read More Here. […]

50. on 19 Jan 2007 at 9:11 pm 50.zzzz said …

    uh, you’re pessimistic

    i haev a ps3, subscription to hdbits.org, 32″ tv (how many ps3 owners have a high def?)

    hd pwnz

51. on 19 Jan 2007 at 9:13 pm 51.Dave from Louisville said …

    This guy is an idiot. I downloaded Fifth Element HD-DVD rip @ 720p and it was flawless video, compressed to 4.2 gb’s.. Yes, that will fit on a single layer standard DVD.
    This guy obviously forget about the whole Pirates like to Recompress the video to save file space.

    What a fuktard

52. on 19 Jan 2007 at 9:14 pm 52.J said …

    I would download it just to see the hype on hd dvds and if the quality was good then I would buy a hd player

53. on 19 Jan 2007 at 9:15 pm 53.zzzz said …

    why the hell are you all saying we don’t have the bandwidth?
    the whole point of putting tv on the net is to impose more internet laws *cough netneutrality backfires cough*

    no bandwidth to dl hd dvd? how long has unet been here with its 15mb file archives?
    size..speed…ha ha ha

54. on 19 Jan 2007 at 9:24 pm 54.Anon said …

    The ironic thing is
    this article was also talk of DVD-r images 2-3 years ago.

    It was unheard of wasting time downloading 4.5GB dvd iso’s

    Now people don’t think twice of it.

    P.S comparing a 20GB lossless EVO image to a completely lossy 700MB avi
    is rediculous

    Mention should be 4GB vs 2GB lossless
    or

    700MB/1.4GB Dvdrip Avi
    vs
    2.8GB/4.5GB x264 HDRip

55. on 19 Jan 2007 at 11:19 pm 55.Saif Ahmed said …

    This seems like 3 reasons repeated over and over

    HD video cannot be compressed

    HD video requires high end hardware and software

    HD video cannot be burned back to disk

56. on 19 Jan 2007 at 11:20 pm 56.Max said …

    And don’t forget, there are already people with higher bandwidths than in America. Europe and Asia have places with 100 Mbit connections (think sweden and south korea), meaning you could transfer a 20 GB movie in much less than an hour. By the time HD movies hit the mainstream, we should have caught up to those other countries.

57. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:15 am 57.AF said …

    Pirates won’t attack HD DVD’s untill there are better programs, faster transference (download time) and posibly better hardware (faster computers). There are not enough titles to make it interesting any way.

58. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:17 am 58.AF said …

    It will take 5 to ten years to happen.

59. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:19 am 59.Letapragas said …

    I think that downloading full quality movies isn’t a realistic goal for pirates! The magic numbers have been 700MB and 4.7GB.

    Pirates are cheap w/ there media spending, they think that the economic cost (different from accounting cost!) of burning a HD-DVD is way too much. Thats why you still have more 4.7 gb dvd rips then those 9.4gb rips. Because downloading a 4.7gb movie cost less money and time then burning a 9.4gb dual layer dvd! Also i bet that there are more 700MB rips out on bittorent then 4.7gb or 9.4gb or 20gb!

    Key thing: Pirates are CHEAP! If DVD and music was $.25 then piracy would go down!

60. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:34 am 60.John said …

    Hey I agree with your post for the most part, but there is a minority(albeit large) that has been “pirating” HD Movies years before HD-DVD’s even existed. They usually just archive the movies to several DVDs. The movies are anywhere from 5-19 GB about, most of them are say 9. Cable internet speeds are getting faster and faster. There is a lot of competition and with verion’s FIOS they need to up the speeds. I get 8mbps down and soon I will have 16 at no extra charge. Downloading them is no sweat. The other thing is I’ve never gotten a HD movie via BT. Usenet my friend is where it all took place. No silly seeders and leechers, just freedom to max out your connection and grab everything you want in hd. BT is not the main source for HD material despite how popular it is. I still know they are some trackers dedicated to HD already that seem to be doing well. Now the rest is pretty acurate it is all playing back off your pc and then to whatever from there.

61. on 20 Jan 2007 at 1:15 am 61.Buservt said …

    Most of your points are simply wrong, what are you basing your ‘facts’ on? Why would you assume that someone tech savvy enough to download and view pirated films would be unlikely to have the necessary equipment to play HD ones? There are a number of free players that will output true HD (VLC for one) that are easy to find and download. Additionally with the size of todays hard drives and speed of broadband connections, 20 gig files are really not that big of a deal.

    I just feel like you shouldn’t represent yourself as an authority on this type of thing if you don’t really know for sure that what are saying is true.

62. on 20 Jan 2007 at 1:26 am 62.Lajos Baranyi said …

    As far as the file size concerned: for downoading there are alternative formats, for example fractal compression. This may compress a file 5000:1 or even more. The algorithm is extremely time consuming -now- but multicore and specialized chiosets are bringing down the conversin times radically. The reconstrution of the movies from the compresed file is fast, and will not pose any problem.
    Clearly, the forseeable future holds this:

    HD content->
    fractal compression ripper-> {exchange over the net}
    ->decompression-playback.

    One should recall what happened with CDs when the MP3 came along…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression

63. on 20 Jan 2007 at 2:38 am 63.ashley said …

    i can fit 5 div-x/x-vid movies on my 4GB SD card (£60 GBP 12 months ago), my dvd player (and mobile phone pda) has a SD card slot which plays a perfect, smooth, crisp, and clear picture so i see no reason to make the HD switch untill prices have dropped 2 or 3 times. Personaly i think X-BOX 360 is the only reason to go HD at the moment apart from the football (soccer) which is on down the pub anyways.

64. on 20 Jan 2007 at 3:57 am 64.DEVIANCE *NFO* said …

    I concur, the file size is too large and demand is low. Plus it takes up too much space and couriering it would be a pain since it won’t fit on a cd or dvd.

65. on 20 Jan 2007 at 4:38 am 65.Chappers said …

    I think the file sizes and download times appear to be an issue now, but in a couple of years they will appear the norm. I remember downloading large files on a 56k line, at the time it seemed tedious at the time. Additionally, the HiDef content protection built into Vista may make these DRM free alternatives more attractive.

66. on 20 Jan 2007 at 5:54 am 66.lol said …

    we downloaded one HD film, but just out of curiosity, i don’t think we’ll make a habit out of it too large and we don’t even have the proper equipment so we can only watch it on a 20″ TFT ^^”

67. on 20 Jan 2007 at 6:06 am 67.Tippis said …

    I couldn’t disagree more.

    Points 1, 2, 4, 8 and 10 are the same argument - size. The size of CD ISOs weren’t a problem back when hard drives came in single-digit gigabyte sizes, and when broadband wasn’t nearly as common as it is today. Looking at the current hardware situation, a 20GB image takes up *less* relative amount on our 500-gig hard drives and megabit pipelines. Next year, the ratio between image size and storage space/download speed will be even smaller. If size vs. storage space/bandwidth utterly failed to keep CD ISOs from being traded, won’t be an obstacle for trading DVD-images either.

    Point 3 would have been correct, had the year been 1998. Today, it is no longer a problem - it was solved ages ago. No file is shared in a “massive” blob of data these days. It is cut up, partitioned, and sent over distributed networks. This point hinges on the old “single-file download over a single FTP connection from a single server” paradigm. Unfortuantely, that paradigm died at the turn of the century.

    Points 5, 6 and 7 are simply ill informed. As always, pirates had access to HD playback software before any legitimate customers did. The hardware needed to play this stuff back and to get it onto a HDTV equates to “just about anything sold within the last 5 years.”

    That leaves point 9, which isn’t a reason why pirates don’t care about HD DVD - it’s the reason HD DVDs (and BR, for that matter) hasn’t catched on i general. In fact, I’d say that these pirates you speak of care more about HD content than your average consumer, because this is a new mountain to climb (as in “why? because it’s there”) and because they generally already have everything that is needed to take advantage of this content.

68. on 20 Jan 2007 at 6:56 am 68.h03024810 said …

    OK, a rebuttal:

    (Don’t flame me for repeating, it’s early sat morning and I’m not feeling too sober from last night, so I can’t be bothered to read all comments! There are lots since it got dugg)

    1. Yes, compared to ‘normal’ 700mb xvid files HD DVD rips are large. Compared to a 4.7gb DVD (which are frequently available for download) they’re not too big. The Internet is getting faster. All these future-savvy pirates may not be distributing these films yet, but the smartest are hoarding any HD they come across.

    2. See point 1. (This isn’t actually a second point. It’s the first point from a different perspective)

    3. Likewise, this is actually a repeat of point 1. The Internet of today and hard disks today aren’t ready for illegal HD distribution in uncompressed format. Give it a year or two this will be a commonplace availability, not a novelty which prompts ‘10 reasons’ lists where three of the reasons are the same.

    4. Although basically the same point again, at least we’ve moved away from the internet. Technology hasn’t quite caught up. Why is this a reason though? The HD DVD format was only cracked last month - of course nobody’s quite finished anything to burn them yet. It will come. less than 20 days is a strict timescale.

    5. Your average everyman isn’t a pirate. Pirates tend to be tech-savvy enough to know a vga out port and a vga in port. Most HDTVs haver these, and most PC’s come with a hand VGA-to-VGA cable to allow this. Yes, it’s not commonplace but that’s the nature of tech. Savvy people do it, then everyone follows.

    6. See point 4,3,2 and 1 . Yes, it takes a fast PC. Well done. It’s a new ‘technology’. Most people seem to be having trouble with their low rev hard drives though, not processing power.

    7…. I give up.

    Here’s your list again in english:

    Reason 1-10: Technology isn’t yet accessible enough to allow for HD piracy to be mainstream.

    Rebuttal, points 1-10: I’m sure DVD piracy wasn’t too mainstream initially. It’s only 20 days in - give it a few months.

69. on 20 Jan 2007 at 7:55 am 69.voovoo said …

    In Australia we have ADSL2+ Annex M, which gives up to 24Mb/s down and 2.5Mb/s up, depending on how far from the exchange you are. I get about 19Mb/s down and 2.3 up, so grabbing 20 gig is no drama at all. The one HD-DVD torrent I have tried came complete in a few hours.
    Seeding is going well too at Annex M speed.
    I have a Sharp 45 inch LCD 1920×1080 res that’s fed directly from a small and quiet but high end PC without Sharp’s silly AV box so it does true 1920x 1080, and true HD looks stunning.
    The movies I have are stored on a different box hooked with teamed gigabit fibre, and that box has lots of disks. That keeps the noise and heat away from the media centre machine.
    HD’s are so cheap, they’re almost as cheap now for storage as CD’s or DVD’s on a direct megabyte to megabyte comparison.

70. on 20 Jan 2007 at 7:58 am 70.GetWithItMan said …

    Funny article.

    Actually, you can download any HDTV HR (High Rez) TV show off of eMule.

    And it runs just fine using a codec like DIVX. Check out the HR HDTV releases of CSI, they look great at 1024×768 on a monitor.

    This article was written in 2005 or something. Get with it man. TVs are the problem. Computers do TV so much better.

71. on 20 Jan 2007 at 9:31 am 71.eville84 said …

    i’ve been downloading full 1080i transport stream files for 3 years now and completly disagree with the points of this article. I built a collection of over 100 HD films before HD DVD and Blueray even came out. I did this all with a fast residential internet connetection and dvd5 discs. Multiple discs is not a problem because i just use them for storage. When i want to watch i stream watch it from my HD with a very free and easy program called VLC. With microsoft introducing home server and many other like applications coming out i think its pretty obvious that all media will be moved to non portable storage within the next 5 years. Who care if your storing your movies on an HDDVD or blueray. Hard drives will be the real thing. Thats why i cant wait till these 1080p images come out from HDDVD and blueray.

72. on 20 Jan 2007 at 9:54 am 72.jnintemann said …

    I think you wrote a good article but the problem is that once the HD DVD protection was broken, things started happening at a very fast rate, it was only a couple days ago that the first movies were re encoded to DVD5 sized 720p x264 files. These files destroy most of the points in that article because the quality loss is minimal (compared to other 720 sources anyway, and most people only have a 720p HDTV to begin with.) and the file is small enough to be easily pirated (4.5GB, the same size as a single layer DVD-R) and while there aren’t any dvd players that can play high def x264 encoded files inside an mkv container, there will be especially if it becomes the standard in which these files are released. (There are already dvd players that will play 720p/1080p XviD/DivX/Mpeg-4 files.) Plus you don’t have to keep the files on your hard drive because they can be burned to a data dvd.
    In the end it will probably be the 4.5GB 720p releases and the 8GB 1080p releases that dominate the p2p scene. I’m not saying people won’t download the 20GB disc images, because some people want quality over everything else. but once cheap burnable media appears then it will probably get more popular, but people will always opt for a little quality loss in exchange for a lot less to download.

73. on 20 Jan 2007 at 11:34 am 73.Wesley Novack said …

    Thanks to everyone for your comments. I will be performing further research and investigating the rebuttals that have been detailed. I shall post a new article with my findings. Thanks for visiting!

74. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:26 pm 74.brian said …

    You’re a f******g moron. I’m pretty sure that it only takes a few hours to download a 20gb file with the proper connection. And also there are already DVD5 sized x264 rips of HDDVDs that look nearly as perfect as the source.

    F******g moron.

75. on 20 Jan 2007 at 12:47 pm 75.horst said …

    Basically, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

76. on 20 Jan 2007 at 1:15 pm 76.Barnaby said …

    I agree with your article although you could’ve saved yourself some abuse from rude teenagers in the comments if you had said “most pirates don’t care”.

    The cost of buying hard drive space, a super fast up and down stream connection, HD DVD burner and media added to the time taken is now closer than ever to the cost of buying a legit copy of the movie. This alone will make most people think twice.

    This pirate will certainly never download a 20GB movie.

77. on 20 Jan 2007 at 2:35 pm 77.jon said …

    1 and 2 are non existent if you know whats going on in this world. Very easy to surpass a terabyte in disk space these days with a very low cost to the ‘pirate’.

    As for 2, it takes me 12-15 hours on cable to download 25-30 gigs, so no problem there either.

78. on 20 Jan 2007 at 5:58 pm 78.Ascii King said …

    Another stupid prediction that fails to look at the past. When video first became available for download over the internet, everyone pointed out the problems with it to show why it would be unpopular. The biggest reason being that the video was crappy too look at. Also, though that the files would be far too large to be useful.

    Now we have somebody who can’t look backwards making the same predictions again. Here is my prediction, downloadable HD files will drive the internet and media markets. Just like last time.

79. on 21 Jan 2007 at 4:46 am 79.Kek said …

    whoever wrote this was obviously abused by a mentally retarded sheep (or is one himself)

    that having been said, I can rest easy knowing that if the majority of the world things like this writer does, software pirates will thankfully be a force to reckon with for a long long time.

    freeware for the masses! long live the pirates! Yarr!

80. on 21 Jan 2007 at 8:52 am 80.Mr Nobody said …

    I wont be going down the HD/Blu Ray downloading road. My hard drives are huge but i think a 700MB xvid quality is perfect.

81. on 21 Jan 2007 at 2:30 pm 81.WesleyTech.com » HD DVD piracy article hits Digg said …

    […] Recently there has been a lot of news and talk about HD DVD rips appearing on Torrent trackers and other peer to peer distribution networks online. Two days ago I posted an article titled “Pirates don’t care about HD DVD movie rips“. The aim of my article was to point out the possible deterrents and troubles that might prevent HD DVD movie rips from being pirated on a massive scale. Some people got the wrong idea and thought that I was trying to say that no one will pirate the available HD DVD rips. Of course that is not the case, and some amount of pirating will no doubt take place. Other provided some very constructive feedback and rebuttals, and I thank those people for participating. I am conducting further research and I will be posting a follow up article in the near future. […]

82. on 21 Jan 2007 at 2:54 pm 82.bob said …

    I have no doubt that as of today all your concerns are valid but tomorrow is a different story. Display technology is now advancing almost as fast as the computing technology that supports it. Broadcast technology is however most definitely not. Very soon 1080p displays, or even higher, will become common place but with very limited sources of traditional content what people are watching in the living room will increasingly be whatever they can download. A 700mb rip may look fine on 19″ monitor but it will truly suck on a person’s 40″ full HD LCD.
    I rather think that from the now on the driving force in display technology will be the limit on what it is feasible to download.

83. on 23 Jan 2007 at 1:59 am 83.Aliarse said …

    “The cost of buying hard drive space, a super fast up and down stream connection, HD DVD burner and media added to the time taken is now closer than ever to the cost of buying A legit copy of the movie.”

    Noticed I’ve capped the “A” in your quote. If 1 movie compares to the price you pay for your needed equipment,fair enough, if all your going to watch forever is that one single movie.

    However, once you have that equipment, you can get as many movie’s as you can download.

    So most people certainly WONT think twice, imo.

84. on 23 Jan 2007 at 3:10 am 84.Adam said …

    No.

85. on 23 Jan 2007 at 5:49 pm 85.Henry said …

    I think a lot of the point is being missed here.

    All we’ve seen is the smoke from the first salvo in the piracy movement. They’ve cracked the formats (BD, HD DVD) thats just the first stage.

    Once a reliable method for transcoding the HD content to an open format becomes available you’ll see plenty of HD rips.

    Anyone remember back to the days of 2 CD rips? Can anyone say 2 DVD rips?

86. on 23 Jan 2007 at 6:54 pm 86.kraken said …

    This post is a heaping pile of bullshit. I’ve also seen many REAL INTERNET PIRATES mock it, because whoever wrote this has no idea what they are talking about.

87. on 24 Jan 2007 at 9:18 pm 87.J. said …

    Have not read comments but one obvious advantage is ripping HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (or even DVD) to e.g. XViD. You decide the quality/quantity then. People like that control. Also, as Usenet is pretty fast, one should have a look over there. Tons of DVDs posted and people do download them, yes.

88. on 24 Jan 2007 at 9:22 pm 88.J. said …

    Sorry for posting twice. Then again, there is also the ricer attitude. And people who claim they really do see the difference. I had various discussions w/various people on another, related subject (wrt lossless/lossy audio) and do believe it goes both ways.

89. on 25 Jan 2007 at 8:23 am 89.Wesley Novack said …

    I will be investigating the HD video compression alternatives available to consumers (such as XViD and x264) and post a follow up piece soon.

90. on 28 Jan 2007 at 9:06 am 90.OMG said …

    What makes you think your follow up piece will be any more accurate than this flaming turd?

91. on 28 Jan 2007 at 3:25 pm 91.Tru7h said …

    Why don’t you leave the follow up piece to people who are actually informed on the subject. I think it is clear 90% of the comment posters could have written a more accurate article than yourself. Almost everything you wrote was incorrect in some way.

92. on 31 Jan 2007 at 5:33 am 92.dule said …

    i want to tell you all that here in Macedonia we have to pay 40e for 4gb a month and i don’t think we are going to download some hd thats all i have to say
    PS: I HATE MY COUNTRY

93. on 31 Jan 2007 at 1:46 pm 93.Mr-T said …

    I have some HD-DVD downloads in a few file sizes. HD-DVD’s aren’t very expensive, however I want them on a hard drive rather than a disc.

    I have my PC output on a 42″ LCD at 1080p, I like to have all of my movies at my fingertips, not change out discs that scratch and are bothersome. I believe that most of the world doesn’t give a crap about the ‘extra bonus features’ and just want the movie. I myself just want the movie in HD resolution as regular dvd looks pretty poor after seeing HDDVD.

    I do own an HD-DVD player, but would love to rip all of my movies onto my PC, Hard drive space is so insanely inexpensive now days you can have a terabyte in your PC for pretty cheap, as I’m sure most people posting here has well over.

    Will people download HD-DVD’s and/or Blu-ray (when it’s ripped, it’s so unpopular noone cares to rip it), of course they will.

94. on 31 Jan 2007 at 1:47 pm 94.Mr-T said …

    Not to mention there are compressed HD formats as everyone has said ranging from 5-12 gigs, that isn’t a big deal to download or store.

95. on 11 Feb 2007 at 8:52 am 95.Clive said …

    Unless you lot are living on ‘planet silly’ (no offense meant) the whole point of HD DVD is IT’S NOT MEANT - repeat NOT MEANT to be downloaded. You’re supposed to buy the 20GB blu-ray discs! That’s why they’re big files because they’re COMMERCIAL discs. Piracy is a fact of life but you lot complaining about the size of downloading an HD file is absurd. It’s illegal in the first place and may I just stress again - HD dvd format IS NOT MEANT to be downloaded, the size is meant to be irrelevant because people are supposed to buy these huge GB dvd and make Sony and Toshiba richer. The idea you lot are complaining about illegally downloading pirate HD files is absurd. Fine, wanna spend weeks downloading a huge file, go ahead but that’s *why* they’re pirate copies. Like kinda obvious!

    Sheesh!

96. on 11 Feb 2007 at 9:05 am 96.Clive said …

    Just to add - it’s possible to watch near perfect HD quality on a 4.7 GB file. If you were to download a true DVD rip of a movie - not a compressed one, a proper dvd rip - watch it on a a quality upscaled dvd player and I promise you it will look *practically identical* to a Sony blu-ray or Toshiba HD DVD film. You will save about 15 gb of data and it will look fantastic. Upscaled dvd players easily rival actual HD players. Indeed, it’s possible to watch near perfect HD quality around 3.5 GB.

    Personally speaking, I think people should buy their films, not download them. If you download a compressed file you get just that, a compressed file - loss of video data - poorer quality. Likewise, if you want to download a 20GB file then you’re going to have spend days wasting broadband space, electricity, hard drive space, hoping the file is complete etc. A free lunch may be a free lunch but don’t expect the food to taste as good as one you pay for!

97. on 20 Feb 2007 at 2:23 am 97.zbl said …

    To “Clive”

    I think the main point out there of downloading HD rips in compressed formats (and some look really REALLY good in fact) is becuase the big media companies, some of which you listed, just don’t want to play fair, so why should we.

    If they are going to treat us as criminals in the first place, then maybe we should fullfill that role instead of jumping through hoops all the time. I for one am not a trained circus animal that does everything the media companies tell me to do.

    If they don’t want to play fair and impose all these abbitrary restrictions on us (DRM) then why should we have to put up with it?

    Wise one once said… if you take away one freedom, where does it really end? I think that is worth a good thought.

98. on 02 Mar 2007 at 2:48 am 98.Jimmy Crack Corn said …

    Blue laser movies are all the rage. Most people like myself cannot afford the drives and even the HD sets. However even on my 19″ LCD the increase in video quality is immediatly apparent. Note I have only a single processor 3.2GHz P4 with an AGP 6800 (128MB). All movies play without dropped frames. CPU utilization varies from 35 to 85 percent. Tools are available to split these large files up onto DVD-R. At 18 cents a disc I don’t mind using 7 to store the large files and free room up to download more. In the future when I can afford a HD disc burner I will consolidate the splits onto one disc. Although I have a 10MB cable connection most files do take a week to get due to slow uploads. To get over I request 20 movies at a time. When one finishes I add another request after I view the movie and transfer it to the 7 DVDs. Obviously if you can download HD DVDs you can find a powerdvd (6.5 no HDCP needed) too. I downloaded 700MB divx files with a dial up modem many moons ago. Keep up with the lastest in video the affordable way.

99. on 15 Mar 2007 at 5:31 pm 99.roman said …

    (Frustrations of an HD TV owner…my personal insight since it seems all bases have been covered here)

    OK bottom line, the only reason people would want to watch movies in HD is because they have a reason to…HD TV set needed!

    Well I have one and even though the market penetration is not that high at this point, times are changing FAST with the insane price drops of HD TV’s.

    I have a 65 inch HD projection TV, and having to sit close to my TV causes a big problem with resolution (small living room). I can say that most DVD’s look like crap in this situation. When I watch HD programming and movies from my cable provider, they look amazing in comparison.

    HD rips would be a god-send for me; I just need the hardware to watch them. I have an Xbox 360 but MS does not allow you to watch non-wmv video files…that sucks! Thinking about switching to a PS3 just to accommodate this process, damn I wish I had a subscription to hdbits.org!!!

100. on 06 Apr 2007 at 3:44 pm 100.quoix said …

     I’ve downloaded a few HD-DVDs from binary newsgroups: Goblet of Fire, Constantine, MI-3 and Children of Men. To play this game it is necessary to spend some time reading around online and experimenting. Also forget about torrents; waaaay too much hassle unless you are truly obsessed.

     With a fast connection (say 6-8mb) and an unlimited Usenet provider it is actually fairly painless: set up a download at night and it’s done when you get up. But again you have to know about par repair, newsgroup headers and indexing services, etc as a prerequisite.

     With hard drives costs heading towards $.30/GB and probably lower, the storage cost is in the $6 range.

     So yea it works and the 1080P quality is absolutely stunning on my Dell 1920×1200 monitor (Athlon FX-55). But the MPAA has nothing to worry about for the forseeable future. There can’t be that many ppl out there with sufficient knowledge motivation and time to waste.

101. on 15 Apr 2007 at 4:06 pm 101.Sonny said …

     “And don’t forget, there are already people with higher bandwidths than in America. Europe and Asia have places with 100 Mbit connections (think sweden and south korea), meaning you could transfer a 20 GB movie in much less than an hour. By the time HD movies hit the mainstream, we should have caught up to those other countries.”

     Lolz. The “standard” connection in Sweden is about 24/2.5 Mbit/s through the telephone line. In the cities there is Fiber, which has 100 Mbit/s for 30$ a month. Anyhow, with the standard connection it would take about two hours to download a 20 GB movie. As it is 3 MB/s, which equals 10.8 GB / h.

     You americans must have really pissy connections if it takes you days to download 20 GB.

102. on 23 Apr 2007 at 4:40 am 102.Michael said …

     “You americans must have really pissy connections if it takes you days to download 20 GB.”

     We do.

     Fiber is very limited.

     Cable downs at 8 mb and the upload is weak, like 40-50kb/s.

     DSL downs like 5 mb and can up at 150kb/s

103. on 20 May 2007 at 4:09 pm 103.HD torrents on BitTorrent update » Blu-ray, HD DVD, info at WesleyTech.com said …

     […] HD torrents on BitTorrent update Back in January, I took a look at some new hd torrents appearing on ThePirateBay. These hd torrents in particular were ripped from HD DVD movies via a (then) recently released, open source tool named BackupHDDVD, which can circumvent AACS protection. Since that time, many new tools have been released, which can also rip and backup HD DVD and even Blu-ray discs. The most popular of those tools being AnyDVD HD and DVD Fab HD Decrypter. So, now that all of these new tools are available, how many hd torrents will there be floating around on the BitTorrent trackers? My guess is a LOT more, but let’s take a look. HD Torrents on ThePirateBay.org I did a quick search for “Blu-ray” on ThePirateBay.org (one of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker websites) and it resulted in 34 hits within the video category. I took a quick screenshot of some of the results and edited the image to remove whitespace and undesired columns. That’s quite a lot of ripped Blu-ray movie torrents. A search for “HD DVD” in the video category produced even more hits, resulting in 141 torrents! Don’t be fooled by the label @CHINA HDTV appearing on all of the torrents. These are mostly English Blu-ray videos, but they were added by the PirateBay user named “CHINA HDTV”. Apparently he labels his torrents with his username. A search for Blu-ray titles on TorrentSpy.com came up empty, but a search for HD DVD turned up approximately 10 HD DVD rips. Looking at the TorrentSpy results, it is clear that the PirateBay has a much larger selection of hd torrents. The future of hd torrents Will these Blu-ray and HD DVD torrents continue to grow in numbers? Definitely. As more and more consumers acquire Blu-ray and HD DVD optical drives, more and more Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD titles will be ripped and then shared as hd torrents on the net. But just because these hd torrents are available, it doesn’t mean that most pirates will actually care about them. Keep in mind that this is just a quick snapshot of the current available hd torrents listed on a couple of the public torrent trackers. There are other elite, non-public communities such as HDBits.org that specialize in high definition content that will most certainly contain very large listings of hd torrents. Related Articles on WesleyTech.com: HD Torrents courtesy of BitTorrentBlu-ray TorrentsDVD Fab Decrypter is now DVD Fab HD DecrypterBackupBluray - Back up Blu-ray Disc utilityBlu-ray rips coming soon to a Torrent tracker near youBest Free Anti Spyware ProgramsPirateBay: BitTorrent on Sealand plan gets sunk […]

104. on 27 May 2007 at 4:47 am 104.Hasnain Zia said …

     Content in HD, either on television or as movies is going to be very popular. Whether the HD movies either in HD DVD or in Blu Ray Format will become popular depends on a few major factors:

     Technology: The technology is always changing. It’s a work in progress. In the old days, we had VHS played in VCR’s. Then the movies started coming as DVD’s and were played in DVD Players. And now it is the time for HD in either HD DVD or Blu-ray disc format. So, the main point that the technology is always evolving and it is not going to change meaning that we have to adapt. Majority of us do not prefer to use our VCR’s anymore and the same thing is going to happen to the DVD’s as well in the long run. How ,many movies are any more available in VHS format. If you somehow still have any reason to like VHS format, my friend you are out of luck and that is the harsh reality. The same thing is going to happen to DVD’s as well.

     Internet: I still remember the days when I had hard time even browsing the html websites. It was when we could only get a very slow dial up internet using our computers modem. But look that the time has really changed. Nowadays, about 70% of the Internet users have broadband internet. It can be safely said that one day dial up will be totally gone for good. As both the download and upload speeds increase, more and more people are going to download movies in HD. An HD movie that takes days to download would just take a few hours just like the DVD rips today. As the fiber optics will be widely used in the near future, we should all observe a noticeable increase in both in download and upload speeds.

     PC: Today, mostly all pc’s with somewhat decent hardware configuration can play HD movies. In the future, they are going to be even more powerful as the advances in different components of the pc will take place. So, rest assured you will be able to see HD content right on your pc and record it as well as store it on your hard drive. The CPU, graphics Cards, HD disc burners, HD creation/editing/burning software and the Hard Drives are going to play the most important parts in HD content creation as well as watching HD content on the pc. Just about a decade ago, pc’s with only 12GB hard drives were available. Nowadays, even the $500 computers come with a reasonable 120GB compared to the past. That’s a huge advancement and improvement in Hard Drives. In the future, Hard Drives are going to be even bigger. I would not be surprised, if in 6 years from now, the $500 computers start coming with 500GB Hard Drives as standard which is definitely going to be a good thing for storing huge HD files.

     High Definition TV: Right now only about 10% Americans own a HD television set. That is only 30 million out of a population of 300 million. As the HD TV’s are becoming cost economical and the prices are dropping increasingly, more people are going to buy them. Once 100 million Americans will own an HD TV, only then are they going to be seriously interested in downloading HD content from file sharing networks. They will want to utilize the true potential of their HD TV’s once they will get used to watching HD broadcasting on their High Definition Television Set. The people are definitely going to prefer HD movies over DVD’s as they have far more detail. Also, the DVD will not be as popular in the coming days. Sooner or Later, the movie studios are going to announce that they will not put movies on DVD anymore and that is going to happen when most of the people will have HD TV’s and HD players in their homes many years after the HD format battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD will be over.

     HD Burners: HD content is not going to become popular with pc users unless if they can burn HD movies right on their computer. For this to happen, HD burners should be very cost effective just like the DVD burners that are standard components even in the most inexpensive computers.
     HD Blank Media: When the HD format battle will be over, the winning format’s blank media disc will also become more cost economical as the demand and production will increase. Right now, Blu-ray discs are very expensive even though they have massive storage. But they will become cheap if they end up winning the HD format battle with HD DVD.

     HD players: Most of the HD players are very expensive, especially the Blu-ray DVD players all with a MSRP of above $700. Although a few HD DVD players are now as low as only $300. These HD players (both for PC and TV) are going to be very cheap in the future, under $100 just like the DVD players right now. But that is going to take some time. No one is going to download HD movies if they can’t watch it on their pc or HD TV’s and they cannot store it on HD discs and watch it later. Therefore, the price has to come down for the people to get interested in buying a HD player and eventually download it using P2P network such as torrents.

     Blu-ray vs. HD DVD: There is no clear winner between Blu-ray disc format and HD DVD at this time. The battle between the two formats has actually been keeping a lot of people to buy HD Players as well and other home theatre equipment as well. So, as long as the two formats are going to stay, the HD movies are not really going to become very popular as people will hesitate to stick to either of them. At the same time, HD players that can play both the Blu-ray and HD DVD formats are coming out. Although, they are still above $700 and there are only a few of them available at this time, mainly from LG and Samsung. Also, one major studio has announced that it will release HD movies on discs that can play both the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats which is very promising but I am not sure if they will continue to do that forever. These dual format HD discs and dual format HD players are reducing the consumer’s risk that one of them is going to become obsolete but in this case they should be pretty safe. As far as I think, Blu-ray has the overall advantage due to its size and other technical specifications over HD DVD. HD DVD, on the other hand has a price advantage over Blu-ray when it comes to HD DVD players as they are about half the price of Blu-ray players. Most of the consumers will like to go with HD DVD players as it is lower in price. Although the price of the HD DVD’s and Blu-ray Discs are still the same at about $20 which is also the same for DVD’s as well. But it is not for me to make a decision that which format will win, the consumers will actually decide that who is going to eventually win. There are also a number of other factors such as the support of Hollywood movie studios and other big companies. Time will tell that who will win!

     HD Software: HD software such for both creation and playing HD content is going to be very important. There are hardly any software based HD players available at this time which is going to change when free media players such as VLC and Windows Media Player will support HD content. There are also not a lot of software utilities available at this time to edit, create or burn the HD content on HD media with the HD burners and HD recorders. The HD content compression will also increase quality and decrease the size of the movies.

     Xbox and PS3: The gaming consoles are also playing some role in bringing the HD movies to consumers. PS3, as we know came with the Blu-ray player as standard. XBOX 360, on the other hand does not come with HD player and therefore is an optional accessory which costs $200. The PS3 owners are obviously going to go with Blu-ray movies as their no out of the pocket cost for them. Whereas, the XBOX 360 owners can either go with HD DVD players as well as Blu-ray as they are going to be buy the HD player. Even though more expensive than XBOX, Sony’s PS3 definitely have an advantage to support its Blu-ray format when it comes to gaming consoles. But it is only for the consumers to decide!

     I hope that you liked my little preview of the HD world!
     For questions, answers and discussions, please e-mail me at (hasnainzia@sbcglobal.net)

     Hasnain Zia
     May 27, 2007

105. on 03 Jun 2007 at 3:08 am 105.shroud said …

     I love movies and own over 800 original dvd disks. I love the idea of 1080p movies and when done correctly with a high bitrate encoded in x264 the results are amazing.
     I don’t waste my time on 5gb 1080p rips as the bitrate is as low as standard dvd, even though you have an advantage of a higher resolution. A good quality rip in x264/wmv vc1 is about 8gb.
     The wmv vc1 files can be played back on my xbox 360 with a usb hard drive formated in HSF+.
     Why bother? Because I am able to watch a movie at a higher resolution with a higher bitrate with DTS audio which is something that none of the dvd publishers listened to except Sony in their now dead superbit format.
     When the war between HD-DVD and Bluray gives us a winner or dual format players come out, I will move to that, but for now x264 rips are the way to go.

106. on 08 Jun 2007 at 8:55 am 106.RooZ said …

     When DVD was released, the average connection was dial up, so what did we do? We upgraded our RAM and unclogged out tubes. (Larger HDDs came out and faster internet was released), also video compression was improved. So give it a few more years and downloading the latests movie on HD0DVD will seam like nothing special

107. on 13 Jun 2007 at 10:07 am 107.JOHN Johnson said …

     You should try .MKV files in 1080P Media Player classic does a nice job with the CCCP codec pack link from the Matrosky site. Another thing to note are the newsgroup accounts that are readily available which enable you to max out your connection. The hell with Bit Torrent switch to a newsgroup account and download at a minumum over broadband 400kb. 20 gigs would take about 8 hours and 100 percent reliable.

108. on 11 Jul 2007 at 9:41 pm 108.Simbolic said …

     I exclusively download full dvd rips unless it’s a brand new movie in which case I still look for high quality from a dvd release from another country.

109. on 12 Jul 2007 at 6:34 pm 109.ZRo said …

     Why are people still talking about 20GB HDDVD Rips? They’re usually anywhere from 4GB up to 8GB with amazing quality, no one uploads the 20GB Evo Files.
     Don’t be stupid.

110. on 01 Aug 2007 at 3:06 am 110.SilverX said …

     4gb, 8gb or 20gb… No matter!
     People will always reach for the best, no matter what the downsides might be.. ..That is why we always keep evolving and pushing the limits forward.

     Besides, any decent ADSL or ADSL2+ line will easy pull 20gb in a few hours and the ISP’s keep increasing their maximum capacity all the time. Give it a few years, and the standard Bandwith they offer will be far greater than it is today.

     Here in Norway we pay only 77$ pr. month for a ADSL2+ line with 22Mbps download speed…

111. on 28 Aug 2007 at 11:46 pm 111.joe said …

     Nice article. I have been thinking a lot about this lately. My computer is my media center. I use Nero Mediahome to play movies wirelessly to my ps3. Downloading is a fly. I download at 14,421 Mbps. So if you add that up somehow, I download 6.5 Gigabytes per hour. Beautiful I think.

     One thing that is still to be worked on is sending the high def signal from the pc to the ps3 without it being choppy.

     I’d download Hd, once I knew I could watch it wirelessly.

112. on 02 Sep 2007 at 6:50 pm 112.Eddie C. said …

     Think of it in comparison to when mp3’s came out. The standard internet connection was 56kbps and i remember it taking me almost all day to download 2 or 3 songs! Obviously technology evolves and our DL speeds will get much faster and soon downloading a 20gb file will take but an hour or 2. Especially if they come out with better compression formats. Im all for progress!!

113. on 03 Sep 2007 at 10:10 pm 113.Boba Fett said …

     With a fast DSL line downloading 20Gb file can take 8hrs-10hrs..NOT days as this article suggests. As download speeds improve this will only take less time and become more enticing. Plus hard drive storage keeps ramping..

114. on 13 Sep 2007 at 4:13 pm 114.azer said …

     I have been downloading a lot of hd dvd movies. this is especially nice when done from a private hd tracker. always full download speed. with 24mbits download speed it dont take more than 2-3 hours to download a 20gb movie. and you dont NEED to keep the files forever so hard drive space isnt really that much of an issue.
     HD is here to stay!! its impossible to watch crappy xvid rips after watching a beutiful 1080p movie.

115. on 01 Nov 2007 at 6:12 am 115.dinges said …

     Hey why’s the guy who published the article so quiet now??

116. on 01 Nov 2007 at 9:45 am 116.Wesley Novack said …

     I’m still monitoring the comments, but I don’t have much more to say on the topic. Readers have provided some valid rebuttals and additional information that can be found easily by reading all of the comments.