So - you've downloaded a Bittorrent client, and you've even managed to find some public BT search engines or have gotten yourself accepted into a private BT tracker. What to download? What's the difference between a TELESYNC and TELECINE version of a movie? Which one's better? What's an SCR, and why are they so popular? Use this handy guide to find out which version of a movie is which!
 

Movie File Types

CAM - As you might guess from the name, these films are made by someone sitting in a movie theatre and pointing a camera at the screen. Because the risk of getting caught is fairly high, CAM movies are usually made with low-end video cameras. So the quality will be pretty bad to begin with, to say nothing of the audience members that occasionally appear in a CAM film, the jerky motion when the person making the CAM shifts in their seat, or the odd camera angles that sometimes happen if the pirate arrives at the theatre too late and has to take a seat at the edge of the theatre. The sound in a CAM film comes from the microphone on the video camera, so CAM films capture any sound in the theatre, such as audiences laughing, cellphones ringing, and people talking in the background. You generally have to be pretty desperate to watch a CAM film; I almost always skip these. The only real advantage to CAM films is that they generally hit the scene first.

TELESYNC - The textbook definition of a telesync film is "a movie where the video is captured by a video camera, but the sound comes from a secondary source". The "secondary source" is almost always the headphone jack available in certain seats for people that are 'hard of hearing'. So thanks to the Americans With Disabilities Act, you can get pristine sound from your pirated movies. However, in the past year or so, "telesync" has also come to mean "a movie filmed from the projection booth, using a high-quality video camera, with sound from a secondary source". The advantages to filming from the projection booth are obvious - since there's a clear line-of-sight to the screen, you won't see audience members in a telesync film. Filming from the projection booth also implies that the theatre's ownership (or at least the projectionist) approves of what's going on, which means that movie pirates can use more expensive, higher-quality video cameras than for CAM films. With quality source material and an editor that knows what he or she is doing, a telesync film can look nearly as good as a DVD. Almost. Sometimes abbreviated as "TS".

TELECINE - A telecine machine is a machine that converts film to a video format, usually videotape or DVD. These are the exact same machines that Hollywood studios use to convert their films to DVD for you to buy at Best Buy or whatnot. Because telecine machines are fairly rare, because they require a decent amount of skill to operate, and because they require the target film to "go missing" from the theatre for some amount of time, telecine releases are amazingly rare. In fact, most movies marked as "telecine" are mislabeled, and are actually one of the following movie types.

WORKPRINT - A workprint is a copy of the film as a "work in progress". They may be missing visual or audio special effects, or they might have a timestamp in the corner of the screen (or both). Workprints are generally leaked by someone in the industry itself or perhaps a courier that's shuffling the film between studios or special effects companies. The overall quality of most workprints is usually pretty good, although how entertaining they are depends on how far along in production the film actually is. A workprint leaked very late in the production process might be nearly indistinguishable from the final product, while one leaked very early on not only might be missing effects, but also might have rough editing and unfinished sound. Workprints are actually pretty interesting as historical pieces, as some have scenes that were cut from a final release of the film.

SCREENER - Screeners are films that studios send to movie critics, motion picture academy members and buyers from video rental chains for "evaluation purposes". During award season, a studio might want to make sure that all the voting members of the motion picture academy have had a chance to see a particular film, so they'll send a DVD or VHS tape out to all members so that they can watch it on their own schedule. Since most screeners are on DVD these days, the quality of most screeners is fantastic... except for one thing. The studios know that screeners get leaked all the time, so they add some annoying "features" to the film in an attempt to keep them from being pirated. The most common "feature" is an extra-long crawler that runs across the screen from time to time in the film. The crawler might say something like "THIS VIDEO IS FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY AND REMAINS PROPERTY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX. VIEWING BY ANYONE OTHER THAN THE INTENDED RECIPIENT IS ILLEGAL. IF YOU PURCHASED OR RENTED THIS FILM, PLEASE CALL 1-800-555-2FOX. ALL CALLS KEPT CONFIDENTIAL. WELL, MOSTLY. UNLESS WE CHANGE OUR MINDS. BY THE WAY, DON'T YOU THINK THAT GLENN CLOSE LOOKS REALLY GOOD IN THIS FILM? WE DO TOO! WE ALSO REALLY LIKE CHARLIE KAUFMAN'S SCRIPT FOR THIS FILM - ISN'T HE GREAT! WHAT'S UP WITH NIC CAGE'S HAIR IN THIS MOVIE? OH WAIT - HERE'S CHRIS COOPER!" OK, so I made up most of that. But the crawler is usually unbelievably long (on purpose). Some studios don't bother with a long crawler and instead simply put "FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY" in the dead-center of the screen, which is (to me) even more annoying. In a screener for The Queen, poor Queen Elizabeth II had "PROPERTY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX" across her face half the time. Another trick the studios play with screeners is to randomly switch the film from color to black and white. All of these tricks seem to be aimed at the commercial pirating of films; most Internet users couldn't care less about the studio's "dirty tricks". "Screener" is sometimes abbreviated "Scr" or "DVDScr" or "VHSScr".

R5 - The newest kid on the Internet! The problem of piracy is huge in the former Soviet Union, so the Hollywood studios decided to release movies on DVD there as quickly (and cheaply) as possible to at least get a few bucks from the Russkies. And these R5 discs are, in fact, quickly put together. They contain no special features. The studios don't bother cleaning up the films for R5 discs at all, so you'll see the occasional "cigarette burn" or scratch in the film - artifacts that are taken care of when the "full version" of the DVD comes out later. These discs generally provide the best quality viewing experience until a DVD rip of the retail DVD disc comes out. Because R5 discs are released so quickly - often just as the film in finishing its US theatrical run - they're becoming the preferred type for many Internet pirates. And by the way, R5 discs get their name from the fact that the former Soviet Union is in "Region 5" of Hollywood's DVD region system.

DVD Rip - These are "rips" of standard DVD releases. Assuming that the movie is a standard Hollywood release, DVD rips are almost always in English, and sometimes include an additional subtitle file. They sometimes even have additional audio tracks (such as the director's commentary), although this is actually pretty rare. DVD rips usually come in "1 CD" (700MB) or "2 CD" (two 700MB files) formats. 1 CD rips almost always have MP3 audio, while 2 CD rips have Dolby Digital (AC3) audio. I actually prefer 1 CD rips in most cases, as my portable player can accept them without modification. 2 CD rips also usually have a slightly higher bitrate and\or have greater resolution than 1 CD rips, although (to be honest) there simply aren't that many films that I MUST HAVE in 2 CD format.

DVD Formats

All of the above examples talk about the source of the film. The actual format of the movies being discussed is almost always AVI. If you'd like to download actual DVD discs from a site, here's what you need to know about it: most DVDs are shared "pre-ripped", in that most region and copy protection has already been removed. Discs might be shared as a folder full of VOB files (or, more likely these days) as an image file (such as IMG). The main types of discs being traded are summarized below:

DVD 5 - A DVD that's probably had all extra features and non-English soundtracks removed. Commercial DVD discs are "dual layer", in that they can have up to two data layers in them. So most commercial DVDs can have up to 9GB worth of data on them. Most home DVD burners are "single layer" in that they only support burning to discs with a single data layer (5GB, actually 4.7GB). Note that dual layer burners and blank discs exist, although up until recently there were extremely pricey and so were rarely used at home). A pirate can "rip" a retail DVD and use a program like DVD Shrink to remove the extra features, non-English subtitles and soundtracks, and\or any "extra" soundtracks (such as a director's commentary or Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack). DVD Shrink can then re-encode the disc so that the film can fit on a single single-layer disc. The more "stuff" the pirate takes out, the better the resulting film will look on DVD. Some films, such as Kill Bill Volume 1, don't need to be re-encoded at all - simply removing the extra features leaves enough room to fit the entire film on a single-layer DVD untouched.

DVD 9 - A DVD that contains a full rip of the disc, with none of the special features removed. You need a dual-layer burner and dual-layer blank disc to burn these to DVD, or you can download them and re-encode them yourself with DVD Shrink. The huge size of these files means that they're generally not very popular with downloaders.

DVD 10 - A DVD that's double-sided, but has a single layer. Certain films without special features that have the widescreen version on one side of the disc and the fullscreen on the other are DVD 10 discs.

DVD 18 - A DVD that's double-sided and has two data layers per side. These are rarely seen online (18GB is a lot to download!) and are pretty rare in the wild these days too. Often used in box sets, especially for TV sets where the makers want to cram as much "stuff" onto a few discs as possible.

Video Formats

Up until now, I've been talking about the sources of online movies. I'll take a few minutes here to talk about the actual format of the movies. Almost all the movies you find for download online are AVI files. These are almost always encoded with either the DivX or XviD video codecs and MP3 or AC3 audio. There are a few "oddball" codecs out there, the most popular of which I've summarized below:

H264\MP4 - These are a flavor of the MPEG4 codec, although to be specific MP4 is a "container" format that can "hold" video encoded with slightly different MPEG4 codecs. H264 is used for Blu Ray and HD DVD films and certain HD and\or digital television broadcasting services (France, Brazil, Estonia and Slovenia use H264 for their digital TV broadcasting, for example). It's also used with video iPods, which is why you sometimes see H264 videos available for download. Keep in mind that H264 is a codec, so an H264 video might not necessarily be "iPod Ready". Usually films that are "iPod Ready" are marked as such.

RVMB - Stands for "Real Media Variable Bitrate". For reasons I cannot fathom, some people prefer their videos to be in Real format, even though they require RealPlayer or a specialized software media player. No portable player that I'm aware of plays RVMB. Although RVMB files are smaller than their DivX\XviD cousins, I know of no one that wants anything in RVMB.

Random Tips

If you connect to a tracker and if, after an hour, you are not connected to any seeds, the torrent is almost guaranteed to be fake.

If the download consists of a single RAR or ZIP file, it's guaranteed to be fake. For example, if the torrent consists of a single file named "Pirates.of.the.Caribbean.At.Worlds.End.TS.XViD-mVs.zip" it's a fake. Genuine torrents are usually shared without compression, such as  "Pirates.of.the.Caribbean.At.Worlds.End.TS.XViD-mVs.avi" or are spanned into 50 or so RAR files.