I’ve seen a few throughout my life at friend’s houses as a kid during the age of Limewire. Typically they were pretty good quality even though you’d see the odd person get up from their seat or hardcoded subtitles. Lately I’ve been curious about the history behind them and how they came to be.
Have there been well known release groups similar to the game cracking scene?
Have they always been mostly from one region?
Are they released strategically for one reason or another?
Have there been hidden methods to bust groups after a release such as steganography?
I’d be down to hear any facts about it you find interesting, stories, and if you have any articles or videos about the subject.
Well you see, when a pirate and a camcorder love each other very much, they go to a movie theater…
̶B̶o̶w̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶c̶k̶a̶ ̶w̶o̶w̶ ̶w̶o̶w̶ Bow chicka record now.
Some family friends brought back cam rips from Egypt of several Disney movies, Beauty and the beast, Aladdin, and a couple others.
They had strange ads for burgers in Arabic, and the cam was really low quality.
We didn’t really know any better being kids, so I always thought that Beauty and the Beast was a dark, terrifying, grainy, nightmarish movie.
Having seen the real version, I have to say the shitty cam copy stuck better in my mind.
Anyways, sorry I can’t answer any of your questions OP.
No worries. I am digging all the stories
That reminded of the shitty cam print of Iron Man 1. Started from the Humvee scene a minute before getting blown off. 20-30% was dark or pointed at floor for whatever reason. Godawful audio.
Thought it was a shitty movie halfway though and stopped. Got a good print after Iron man 2 released and faithfully watched all marvel release, many in cinemas, till Infinity war. Now its all available on Disney+ and I won’t watch the new ones after it.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in this thread mention Telecines at all. It’s a machine that captures the video and audio from the film print directly to digital. A lot of good Cam rips were filmed from the projection booth, and could conceivably be done by a projectionist surreptitiously. Telecines though, required a large piece of equipment and time with a print outside of hours. Likely you’d need to be a manager or owner to get away with it, or have their blessing.
I remember the excitement of finding a Telecine for a movie in theatres rather than a Cam. It felt like striking gold. I bet the people releasing those in scene groups would be treated like gods back then.
Also, Telesyncs, which would be labelled TS, is when you have that high quality cam recording and sync it to a direct recording of the audio. The audio often came from the FM microbroadcast that are designed for hearing-aid users.
Don’t even get me started on how audio is included on a 35mm film print. Dolby Digital is an image of a digital signal (basically a QR code) that is between the cog-wheel holes on one side. Good Telecine machines are able to record the full surround track from this. That used to be the absolute best you could get while something was still in theatres. Often better than award copies, they had no stupid watermarks.
This actually sounds like a great topic for a documentary
I’d watch a two hour YouTube video on that
I’d even get the Xvid DVDrip of it, but never the cam rip they are vile 😂
I’d put it in “Watch Later” and never actually end up watching it.
There’s so much I should finally watch.
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Was about to write the same thing as your last paragraph, the “wanting to be first” aspect. But you also made me realize how Cam rips might have been an important service in the past. Today we are drowned in new web-dl stuff constantly
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I downloaded team america world police on my computer when it came out, which ended up being a screener copy. My friend in college thought I was a hacker
In the past, I remember getting cam rips first and if they were terrible and it was a movie I wanted to enjoy, I’d stop watching and wait a few months for a DVD rip. It’s been a long time since I’ve faced that dilemma though.
Significant part of camrips now is sponsored by non-licensed gambling operators who literally pay tens of thousands dollars to bootleggers who can film latest releases and bring recording to them on exclusive basis. There’s even some habitual bootleggers who film camrips for their living. So when you watch camrip of the latest hollywood title which is spammed with gambling ad watermarks then most likely this casino/betting operator has paid someone to record the screening.
Hijacking to pose another legacy piracy question. My dad would often buy pirated DVDs at the barbershop. You know, with the sharpeid title on the disk. Occasionally we would get a DVD with an unfinished movie in it. It would often have a watermark saying something like “Property of Universal “ and some scenes, especially CG heavy ones, would be incomplete. I assume these were leaked from editing houses or the sort but is this a type of release that’s seen in modern pirating?
Those were from test screenings. From a group screening, or from copies that were sent to people.
The For Your Consideration copies that you’d see sometimes are from copies sent to things like the academy awards and Oscars
That sounds like a workprint. The linked wiki page has notable examples of workprints that made their way onto Internet, sometimes before the movie was even in theaters. I don’t think this is typically a sought-after version for pirate groups, their existence is likely more of a convenience situation. Someone got their hands on the workprint, uploaded it online, and it spread from there.
The holy grail for pirate groups used to be screener copies, finished versions of films that are sent to reviewers, promoters, etc. before release. I remember a (relatively brief) time when finished copies of movies were routinely popping up online even before they were in theaters. Such leaks have largely been stopped by difficult-to-remove watermarking of screener copies and workprints. Every such copy that goes to an editor, VFX house or film reviewer gets its own unique watermark trace embedded in the copy. If the studio finds that your copy was leaked online they can fire / sue / blacklist you. It’s massively curtailed such leaks.
I wonder if AI could do a number on those watermarks. Have a program like Topaz upscale it a bit and add some noise and grain. That should be enough to destroy however they identify it visually.
The technical issues could probably be tackled, but realistically I doubt we’ll ever return to the screener copy glory days. By now everyone who receives a screener copy knows about the watermarking software, and release teams would have a hell of a time convincing them that the watermark can 100% for sure be removed. The person in possession of the screener copy has every incentive not to share it, since the costs of getting caught are so high (fired and/or sued and/or blacklisted in the industry).
I don’t have any source for this, but screener copy leaks were so prevalent at one point that I have to imagine that money was changing hands. Release teams behind paid sites were probably bribing recipients of screener copies so their site could have the pirate copy first, and later it would spread to free sites. Given the number of people that receive screener copies, studios realistically had no way to figure out who was leaking them so it was essentially free money for the leaker. The price paid to the leaker was probably not all that high since the risks were so low.
As soon as the watermarks were in, the risks for the leaker went up dramatically and so would their price. Watermarking was actually a very clever solution to the problem. Rather than adding DRM, which would bog down their workflows and piss off their customers, studios added watermarks that made it uneconomical for the leaks to continue.
In Italy between the movies were screening in the cinemas and dvd releases there was a wait time of 3 months. Exactly three months. The most common way of piracy was streaming websites (like cineblog nowadays) pestered with ads. Before the age of WEBDL most people who couldn’t pay for the cinemas and everybody who wanted to have lots to talk about pop arts and trends was watching cam rips. The quality of cam rips were ever increasing every year with specialized forums discussing hardware to do it. I remember you could find everything from low quality phone cams (we are talking 2006 phone cameras) rips to tv quality cameras pointed to the screen from inside the cinemas with tripods.
Project X was such a hyped up movie in Italy that I personally witnessed a bunch of people recording it in the cinemas and everybody at school was sharing the phones on which the movie was recorded during lessons.
To be honest camrips started to disappear during and after covid, but even now for very famous movies like Barbie and Hoppeneimer of Marvel stuff people are still downloading those.
For reference:
- avg ticket price in italy: 6.25 euro in 2022, 5.75 euro in 2016. If you count inflation, price basically decreased over the years
- most cinemas do many cheap ticket nights like for students or young people aimed at 2-5 euro range for tickets once a week or once a month
- more realistically, most cinemas have tickets for 8 or 9 euros, 10 to 12 euros in big cities
- around 60% of people earn less than 1300 euro net per month. That is an hourly pay of ~5 euros. You can understand how much a movie night for a family with popcorns and various extra may cost for a family.
I also find these fascinating, mainly because I have absolutely no idea why anyone watches them. They look and sound awful and if you maintain just a modicum of patience you can have a significantly better experience a few months later.
The image quality is better than what it was, and the sound can be okay if captured directly instead of the theater room’s audio (some theaters offer audio jack for accessibility purposes).
I watched one by accident a few weeks ago. It was the audio that threw me off. You could hear people chatting. But the video looked not half bad - I figured it had just been transcode poorly or something.
I remeber downloading a cam version of Hunger games without realising at the time and the sound was fine, but the video was so shaky it felt I was hunger gaming myself
What you want is a Cam with Telesync, at least you don’t get the background noise.
There is a social aspect to it. For corporate workers, people are almost ostracized and excluded for not ‘being up with the latest big thing’. It’s toxic, and I hope starting to change, but I imagine these would be the primary audience go ogling “barbie movie stream free” and clicking the first ad-ridden site they find.
Which corporate workers can’t afford to see a movie in the cinema?
The more you can afford with money, the less you can afford with time.
In regards to your question about hidden methods to catch people, back before digital each film print sent to a theater had a unique “CAP Code” printed directly onto the 35mm film. This was a series of dots in a unique pattern that would show up several times on screen. So when a cam rip would show up somewhere this could be used to narrow down which theater it was recorded at and identify trends after several films.
I don’t know if this was ever successfully used to prosecute anyone though.
Have you seen the Seinfeld episode?
deathblow
I was a projectionist years ago and it would have been very easy to cam rip films on “print build nights.” Was always a Wednesday, we’d all come in late and built the reels into full prints for our big horizontal platter projectors. We’d all then separate off and watch the movies after the theater closed to note any defects or other issues before those movies launched that week.
If a film was DTS audio (the film had a time code and that would sync with CD audio tracks), you could have even run a sound recorder to the headphone jack on the DTS tower that handles the audio for those prints.
When i worked in Baltimore oriole would walk into my shop and try and sell just about anything, i used to get a lot of these cam rips. A few were scams so i brought an extra VCR, and later a DVD player and stuck them in the back room so i could at least threaten to check before buying.
In the last 10 years, I stopped in this gas station off a busy road in my home town. They have bootleg dvds just on the counter.
I can’t believe that place didn’t get shutdown. There is a police station just a few blocks away.
Cops don’t care about those. That’s for lawyers to deal with.
That’s fair.
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Good point! I’d be to scared to buy one as it might be an undercover op 😂😂
Plus it’s too easy to get online for free anyway.
I had a job doing this. I went to see Death Blow with my friend and he brought his friend, Brody, along. Just as the movie starts he pulls out a camcorder and starts filming!
I thought it was crazy. Anyway after a while Brody gets real sick in the stomach from too much candy. My friend had to take him home, but before he leaves Brody pulls a damn gun on me and says I have to finish recording the movie!
I didn’t know what to do so I just said yes and took the camcorder. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just pointer at the screen and tried to hide from the attendants.
I couldn’t believe it, when I gave Brody the recording he said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, he even called me a genius! My bootleg tape was a smash hit. He asked if I could go film an ‘arty’ movie next, Cry, Cry Again. I was torn up inside, as I disagreed with bootlegging but didn’t want to say no to Brody. So I asked my friend to ghost-film it for me. But when I saw the crap he recorded I refused to let it go out under my name. I demanded we re-film, with three camcorders throughout the theater with headsets to coordinate. Brody said no, so I quit right there.
In the end the version my friend filmed went out, but my other friend accidentally taped over the ending with her dancing. Oh, and my other friend tried to take up bootlegging to impress a girl, but he got arrested and cried.
Anyway, what’s the deal with airline peanuts?
That’s gold, Jerry
