list your favourite HD release group

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.

athenaesword said:
from what you say, these better rips from nonscene groups are accompanied by a significant increase in size, which is of course understandable and not that much of a problem for me, but is size a good gauge of the quality of the rip? it's certainly not indicative for dvds but i'm still relatively new with HD.
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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.

athenaesword said:
also, if you burn these HD movies onto DVD as data DVDs, you would need a HDDVD or bluray player to play it right? (also another seemingly redundant question but i recently burnt a HD movie onto dvd and it played on my dvd player except the quality was pretty bad)
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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.
 
Look for non-scene releases, particularly CtrlHD, Esir and iLL. Their encodes are generally better compared to scene encodes. (But there are exceptions.) The reason is that scene groups race who would release first, thus compromising picture quality. A good rip would take hours to complete.

Among the scene groups, the decent ones (based on my experience) are those of hV and Reveille. CDDHD's rips are the worst, imo, followed by Septic. Try to avoid those ,if you can. :)

P.S. I'm just expressing my opinion. So no offense to the scene groups I've mentioned. Take it as a challenge to do better. Good luck!
 
I can't believe I didn't reply to this thread yet!

Private group: ESiR for sure. They have become a standard for any of my downloaded HD material. Unparalleled consistency on any/all releases I downloaded of theirs'.

Scene standard groups: CBGB/SiNNERS; they always encode movies properly, and usually add in an extra contrast/brightness factor, that seems to always make the movie look better than from other sources. I usually am very irked when an encoder decides to edit something in the movie to his taste, but those two groups just have plenty of fine taste in what a director would love to see his movie shown as.

Niche HD group: THORA; can't ever complain about their releases. Timely/nice, and now they're even back! :D
 
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