list your favourite HD release group

P

PAT A

New member
CtrlHD and ESiR are the best. I always wait for ESiR's releases, don't bother to download other groups' releases especially being fan of DTS format. ;)
 
could you guys rank the quality of the HD movies released by the different groups. occasionally movies are released by multiple groups and it'd be nice to know which to go for. i've heard good things about ESiR but i'd like to hear your opinions about the rest of them.

downloading both and testing isn't a good option for me because currently my PC's only hooked up to a 19" screen. somewhere along this year i'm getting myself a 50" TV so i'm buffing up my HD storage for now.

some of the release groups:
hV - scene
CtrlHD - non-scene
ESiR - non-scene
ill - non-scene
hV - scene
SEPTiC - scene
CDDHD - scene
REVEiLLE - scene
SZ - ?????
chakra - ?????
sinners - ?????
NiX - ?????
PRiDE - ?????

thanks guys.
 
Daniel said:
Proper is a term from the scene and it means that someone released a better/working version of it. It can mean that the previous release had for example an invalid serial number or a crack that wasn't working or it means an error was made in the process of encoding music, movies or tv.

Size is no good indicator on its own but it's an important part in the calculation. What's basically important is the bandwidth available for the video and with fixed size limits, the scene releases have to take some hits here. Some animated movies can produce amazing results with relatively small sizes of 2-3GB in 720p so there are always exceptions. My personal "rule" is that 720p content below 4000kbps is not enough to satisfy me and I've seen plenty of CTU/NBS tv-rips to confirm that.

It's not that easy, unfortunately. There aren't really any hardware players to support mkv files on a dvd, so you will need to find other methods of watching this stuff on your tv. When you burned the hd movie on a dvd, you most likely did a downconvert to the respective pal/ntsc resolution and reencoded the movie in the proper mpeg stream. That's a sure way of wasting quality.
There are quite a few ways out there to properly watch highdef content on your hdtv and none of that include burning on any medium (yet) and using a hardware solution for playback. Okay, that's not quite true, because there are ways to do this, take the xbox or playstation 3 for example, generally streaming is the best way to go for the moment. Other hardware players capable of mkv-hd-content are slowly starting out (see the Popcornhour Networked Media Tank for an example) but they are not perfect yet.

edit: about SEPTiC .. they have a horrible reputation among hd enthusiasts and if you compare some screens between theirs and non-scene rips you'll see the difference. Any hd movie will be better to watch than the dvd-rip in comparison but why settle for a 'cheap scene rip' if there are better alternatives out there? I don't see any reason to bitch about scene groups because they also deserve their respect for what they do - but truly, the only reason to download a scene-hd-rip is to watch it a couple of days earlier, before CtrlHD/ESiR or someone else does an encode. Because of my Usenet access I am downloading scene releases and they're fine to watch most of the time, whenever I want to 'archive' a movie though I try for a better alternative.
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other than ESiR and CtrlHD what other non scene groups are worth taking a look at. a previous poster mentioned iLL. if ESiR and ctrlhd ripped every HD and bluray movie there is to rip i'd be more than happy to download everything from them but unfortunately some of the movies aren't released by them.

i'm cool with waiting for non scene rips, so my downloads will be prioritised in that direction from now on. i'm not even a 0day kinda guy, and most of it is for archiving purposes anyway, since i've watched majority of these movies on dvdrips already.

would you consider hdtv rips worthy of downloading? i've heard people say that they're vastly inferior to true hddvd or bluray rips, but they're usually the same size, so are they truly so poor? one thing i don't like about them is the aspect ratio, but i'm inquiring about the image quality.

and i get what you said about the dvds. guess i'll stick to watching stuff on my computer till technology catches up or becomes affordable.
 
My suggestion, don't limit yourself to a few groups because you will miss out on some good things but both ESiR and CtrlHD are a good place to start. If we're talking about HDBits, you should see the screenshots for yourself (sometimes you get direct comparisons to the scene-release) or read the existing comments. Just because you don't know the person or group who released something doesn't mean it's bad quality.

athenaesword said:
would you consider hdtv rips worthy of downloading? i've heard people say that they're vastly inferior to true hddvd or bluray rips, but they're usually the same size, so are they truly so poor? one thing i don't like about them is the aspect ratio, but i'm inquiring about the image quality.
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There are almost 700 torrents on HDBits that fit the search "hdtv 720p" for example and some of them are worth checking out because there's literally no other alternative available. One of the most important examples: The Lord of The Rings trilogy in HD. Here is a link to a screencap of the 1080p encode of The Two Towers. While HDTV rips are generally not up to par with BluRay/HDDVD rips, any highdef encode is worth downloading if there is no other alternative to choose. hdlover (HDL) is someone I can reccomend, he's probably using the German pay-tv channel PremiereHD to create his hdtv-rips and uses the English audio track from a DVD to complete his rip.

athenaesword said:
and i get what you said about the dvds. guess i'll stick to watching stuff on my computer till technology catches up or becomes affordable.
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I didn't say that watching hd movies on your hdtv is impossible because it isn't, but the way you went about it negated all advantages of those hd movies. The most important thing is the video codec - dvd's simply aren't efficient enough with their old mpeg codec anymore. The best way is to build a HTPC box to stream the video content, because it offers you the most freedom and because of it's system based either on Linux or Windows it offers you compatibility like no other solution. On top of that it allows you to store data in a reasonably cheap way on conventional hard drives.
 
CtrlHD, ESiR and EuReKa are my favourites.

I'm no expert though, so I usually pick the largest filesize I can find on HDBITs, at least for favourite movies.
 
METiS

They've pre'd a lot of good shit this year and get it out nice and early. Before someone hates on the scene HD quality, I know all about it. Some scene encodes suck, some are worth watching even if some p2p group will release something a month or two later with higher pq. I find METiS encodes to be very close in terms of pq to those by WiKi and they seem to have the same source since at least this summer.
 
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