P2P Scene Tags

[alex28]

Downloading TV episodes has become extremely popular within theBitTorrent/P2P community. However, some of you might not be completelyfamiliar with all the TV-Torrent tags. The filename of a TV-Torrentcontains a set of tags that give you information things like thesource, quality, and release group.

Source TagsThese tags indicate the source and are an indication of the “quality” of the rip.
TVRip: Recorded from analog TV, lowest quality of all TV rips
DSRip: Recorded from Digital Satellite, good quality rip
PDTV: Recorded from Pure Digital Source, but not HDTV. The quality is similar to a DSRip
HDTV: Recorded from a HDTV source. High video andsound quality. The video resolution is often 624×352, and the audiostream 128kb/s MP3
HR.HDTV: Best Quality There is. Recorded from aHDTV source. The video resolution is often around 960×540 which is halfthe size of the original HDTV broadcast. A 45 minute show is often700MB instead of 350MB like the other releases.
Release Group TagsThe groups that release the episodes often include their group tag. The 10 most active tv-release groups (statistics up to March 2006) are:
LOL, LOKi, TCM, XOR, FQM, UMD, CRiMSON, RiVER, TBS, CTU
Market Share (cte)
http://static.flickr.com/35/108657839_b49642079b.jpg?v=0

Compression

Sometimes the filename has some info about the compression format. For video you will often see Xvid or Divx, this means that you need these codecs if you want to play the file. An example of an audio tag is AC3.5.1. The audio tag is often included in high quality rips to indicate that the audio is not compressed.

Other

Proper: The proper tag is to indicate that the show is released before by a different release group, but that this release is of higher quality.

Repack: The Repack tag indicates that this is an improved version of an earlier release. If the initial release contains sound or video errors for example, the second release will have a repack tag.

via

[Kargor]

720p --- that's a HDTV source, and is released as 1280x720 and encoded as H.264.

There's a number of rules concerning 720p releases concering musts and must-nots. They end up being high quality, and around 1100MB per 40 minute episode. 60 minute episodes end up being around 1500MB. Sound is in AC3.

As for proper and repack I would like to clarify a little detail. "Propers" are not "higher quality" (unless they changed the rules over the years, in which case I apologize for mis-propering the description :-) ), they are simply fixed versions because the other group screwed up and violated the release rules in some way. This generally means technical flaws such as audio being out of sync, encoding screwups or commercials left in the release.

"Repack" is the same, except that the group that made the bad release noticed and rereleased a new version before getting propered by another group. So the result is the same, it's just a matter of who makes the fixed release (incidentally, I don't think "fixed" is an official tag :-)).

If you want to know what the problem with the original release was, try to get hold of the "nfo" file for the new release. Proper/Repacks are required to describe the problem in their nfo file, and if possible illustrate it in their sample.

iNTERNAL --- in general, the "scene" has one "official" release, which is the one that's out first. If a group decides to release their own version afterwards, it's an "internal" release. That's also the (only) way to officially release a higher quality version of something that doesn't violate the rules and therefore can't be propered -- although in my experience, an "internal" for a 720p release doesn't necessarily imply better quality.

As far as subs are concerned, just saying "it's synced for the 720p" may not be enough. It's best to repeat all the relevant tags --- 720p, group name, and proper/repack if applicable. "internal" is somewhat redundant since it doesn't really mean anything, but it doesn't hurt mentioning it.

REAL --- I'm not entirely sure about the official definition of this. It's mostly a clarification tag: a "S01E12.REAL" indicates that there are other "1E12" releases which are, in fact, not the official 1E12.

[honeybunny]

Thanks for the contribution.. I've been meaning to correct the proper / repack definition but i honestly forgot

And about REAL, you are right. It happened for Eastwik 1x11 and for FlashForward 1x12. Makes sense what u said.