Recording quality vs. redistribution quality

hello,

with hdtv nowadays it seems reasonable to me, to release high quality versions in hd720p with dolby
digital 5.1 sound and eztv already redistributes those for certain shows. however, the release groups
that are releasing those high quality recordings also release high quality versions for other shows on
the site, where there are only low quality versions available on the eztv redistribution channel. i would
thus like to ask you for including those higher quality versions for redistribution as well. dimension
does a lot of those, but they don't appear on eztv.
secondly, it bugs me a bit, that the lower quality versions always apear first in the feed and get spread
up to 4 hours before any high quality versions get redistributed. this bugs me for the most part,
because reencoding a high quality video file to a lower quality one would be what would be applied
here, whereas it should take longer to release those. i am aware that another release group is
recording those and probably cuts and encodes them at the same time with the higher quality versions
at the other release group, but most people always want to watch the show and don't care about the
quality at all. this leads to the higher quality version being slower distributed. i would therefore
recommend to release the high quality versions before the low quality versions as well.

so in short:
please include the hd720p x264 ac3 dd5.1 versions whereever they are available and put them in the
feed before the sd351p xvid mp3 stereo versions.

thanks a lot. 🙂

can i have some? i don't normally do drugs, but the ones you are on seem really far out

can i have some? pleeeeeeeaze?

ok, i've had my coffee


nightmarejoker2, obviously you are just starting out with torrents, so here is your answer (if you had
bothered to read the faq/help thread you would know that eztv is not a capping group, they just re-
distribute the shows for us)

so they release them in the order they are released at top site level, since the xvid takes considerably
less time to encode than the 720p etc, they will normally be released first.

sometimes it is the opposite, but only when there is prolems with the xvid release

well, i'm always seeding to 2.5 ratio and even more, if there's no show popping up in the feed that gets
added to my repository.
the sd351p resolution just looks like blurry garbage on my high def monitor... and, yes, i know, eztv
is a distribution and no release group, that however wouldn't make it any harder to put torrents from
the release group into the feed. 🙂
dimension does almost everything in 720p... call me lazy, but there's no subscription feed for that and
eztv has one.

nightmarejoker2, unfortunately it isn't as easy as "dimension released it, so let's add it to the
eztv feed." and while your seeding to 2.5 helps the swarm in general, it doesn't really affect the
initial seeding. when a torrent is released, first they need to build a small group of high-speed
initial seeders, then they release it to the general population. there just aren't enough of those
initial seeders (i assume) to handle every show we'd like.

to illustrate, there was one guy who used to release a 175mb show i liked on mininova. he seeded it
all by himself, which meant that after 5 minutes there was 1 seeder, and 200 peers. now, i can
download 175mb in less than 30 seconds and then seed to a ratio of 100:1, but because there were so
many peers, many of them slow, fighting for that one seed, it took over an hour to download. that's
why they need to build those initial seeds. but there are a lot of shows, and a limited number of
initial seeders.

i hope that clears things up.

nightmarejoker2 brings up an interesting point : a great number of us have or are in the process of
upgrading to hd content display (full hd lcd screen with matching computer power) since prices have
dropped significantly and the difference in image/sound quality clearly warrants the upgrade.

so starting next season, i am sure since i am one of them, there will be a surge in the demand for 720
and 1080 quality content significant enough to convince you that organizing a primary seed cloud for full
hd episodes should be a priority.

eztv can greatly help the transition by announcing a drop date for sd quality and dedicate fully to hd.
no, i am not high right now.

tadanga, i don't think you have entirely thought this through. setting a date for sd withdrawal will
embolden our enemies.

if i want to watch something in hd, i'll easily dvr it. i download to archive stuff, and if there's a show
that my dvr didnt pick up, i'll just waste 5 minutes and download the sd file.

hd is nice on the tv, but broadband can still be quite expensive in some areas, and sometimes they'll
cap your limit. so, sd will be around for a while. the only way eztv will stop seeding them, is when the
groups stop releasing them.

i hope you will keep the regular quality files for the torrents. in my case, my bandwith has a limit and
if i go beyond i have to pay a little fortune for each extra gig. these files are just temporary, frankly,
once the dvds are out, i buy them, i get the best quality then and all the goodies that come with the
dvds, and i delete the files i downloaded.

agree

for the average home user, particularly in australia, bandwidth is an expensive and finite resource.
forcing sd torrents from the site so that a 1 hour show might be 1gb or more is crazy talk.
if i like a show or series, i'll go out and get it on dvd/bluray, but i am most happy to treat the
sd as a preview, and i am most grateful to the site and the initial seeders for that opportunity.

what you're looking for is a private tracker/usenet. eztv is a tracker for the masses, most of which
simply don't have the upload (or even the download capacity) provided by the isp to seed at an
acceptable rate. sure, there are some of you who seed at 1:1 or more, but you're the exception, not
the rule.

how much of that is because the sd versions come out first, and how much of it is people who prefer
it? i get the 720p version of every show i like that is available (much to the horror of my hard
drives) simply because i can't stand the pixelated look of sd videos.

i like the 720p releases and download them exclusively if avalaible, seed them to a ratio to 10:1 (i
seed all my torrents from free of registrarion sites to this ratio) which takes about 2 to 6 hours
depending on the amount of torrents that i download simultaneous and the number of peers for that 1
gb file, but let's be onest here, it's going to be a long time until sd content will dissappear. and don't
forget, dvd is also sd and i don't see them go anytime soon.
also, i don't know how the shows are broadcasted, but i think that the raw recorded shows need to be
encoded to both sd(3**p)/xvid/mp3 and hd(720p)/x264/ac3, and as scifi3001 said, the sd version
takes less to encode and distribute, that is the reason they appear first.
so for the shows you don't find them here in hd and know that are broadcasted in hd look somewhere
else and you will find them in hd (like i do with "lie to me" :d).

yeah well... i can understand why eztv doesn't cover everything in 720p, even though i don't like it :-)

haven't seen a 350mb in ages --- if eztv doesn't have the 720p i try to get it elsewhere, but i
basically never fall back to 350mb unless i can't come up with a 720p at all (for shows that air in
hd, this has only happened once in the last 2 or so years).

for me, the 350mb (for shows that air in hd, so merlin isn't covered here) is only good for one
thing: it shows me that a new ep has aired, and that i should start looking for the 720p...

i still prefer the eztv if available, though, for a simple reason: reliability. i'm assuming they
are "the real thing", and i'm assuming that they'll distribute repacks/propers as well. having lots
of seeds/peers is nice, but i prefer a crawling 720p over a fast 350mb anytime.

things are developing now very fast as terabyte-scale harddrives have become something of a
commodity, and broadband speeds keep doubling. my local isp dropped all sub-10mbps contracts from
their service portifolio last month. for me, it's now almost absolutely indifferent whether the file
is 1 gib or 350 mib. i personally download exclusively min. 720p now, because once you get used to
it, there's really no going back to sd without annoyingly noticing the "low quality" and compression
artifacts. so 720p is also *more enjoyable* than sd. too bad eztv is releasing so few 720p's, as i
like especially breaking bad, and its carried only in sd. so, i have to turn to other sites for my
daily 720p ☹️ but i still love eztv.it and greatly value the work you guys have done over the years,
still coming here every single day, but more and more just to bounce off to other sites when only sd
torrents are provided.

the argument that hd is not popular does not hold. it holds if you have a slow broadband, but e.g.
in torrentday, where many people go for their hd needs, x264 rels are only about