Let's re-cap

[shitman]

Alright, just to clarify and re-cap the latest developements of the bRB thing in ONE topic:

1) Is bRB coming back? (Y/N)

2) If YES, in what form?
Is it going to be on IRC/DCC?
or is it going to be a blog-like thing (like those blogs that index tons of Rapidshare material)?

3) Is this official? http://blinkrebels.blogspot.com/

4) If YES, why isn't it constantly updated?

5) What happened to http://blinkrebels.net/ ?

6) Will the group be functional when it gets back? Will all or at least some of the old experienced members be there?

Thank you

[(•ิ_•ิ) Sasha (•ิ_•ิ)]

ok

[Julian Casablancas]

yeah

[kevin-182]

seriously, i'd like to know about those questions too

[LeedsAdam]

oh what a beautiful day

[total tool]

1) Y

2) website

3) I have nothing to do with it.

4) -

5) its coming back. im aiming for mid july.

6) who knows. the only real talk with older members is releasing the Audio From live shows in higher formats. (Flac etc). I think its going to try and focus on the present. I have an idea for the new site, and im hoping people contribute to it and it becomes something cool.

[LeedsAdam]

1) Y

2) website

3) I have nothing to do with it.

4) -

5) its coming back. im aiming for mid july.

6) who knows. the only real talk with older members is releasing the Audio From live shows in higher formats. (Flac etc). I think its going to try and focus on the present. I have an idea for the new site, and im hoping people contribute to it and it becomes something cool.

who is this?

[GrandpaQueefer]

ender

[shitman]

New blog on blinkrebels.blogspot.com:

SHITMAN
is ghey!
and
bRB is coming back fur realz.

stay tuned

My comment:

Hey there,
I'm shitman from blink-182online.com could you please come to the board and tell us more, we're all dying for info.

Thread link:
http://www.blink-182online.com/forums/index.php?topic=89298

Thank you

http://blinkrebels.blogspot.com/2009/06/shitman.html

[bart.]

I think bRB should focus on HD and FLAC indeed.
Or do seperate releases for SVCD/XVID and HD.

[kevin-182]

man, FULL HD files are HUUGE... they're PERFECT, but 300mb for 2 vids is too much for me... i dont need something so big

i don't need FLAC files... mp3 v0 are perfect for me... it's nice if they're gonna post FLAC, but PLEASE don't give up on mp3

[shitman]

I think bRB should focus on HD and FLAC indeed.
Or do seperate releases for SVCD/XVID and HD.

Totally agree.

About the videos: even though it might seem excessive now, in a couple years the internet will become way faster, these formats will be way more spread and HD monitors and TVs will be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more popular. It's something we do for the future... otherwise a couple of years from now people will ask us to re-rip past stuff in HD. Obviously, this doesn't mean we have to upscale SD stuff to HD just for the sake of it! It just means we should release in the best POSSIBLE quality.
For this purpose x264 is great! because it's scalable, so it will do great with all videos (big or small)!
To sum up, I suggest we release:
future TVrips in x264-HDTV (720p or 1080i depending on the source signal...)
past DVDrips in x264

both with no parallel xvid/svcd releases. XviD is dying, I bet it'll be banned in the new scene rules and will be completely substituted by x264... as for SVCD... it's SO DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD SUPER DEAD AND MORE IMPORTANTLY TERRIBLY OBSOLETE!!!!

As for lo-res rips like past TV rips or old cammed bootlegs surfacing these days... well that's all another story... just keep the original resolution and encode them with x264. Peace.

About audio files, I wuold suggest we do parallel FLAC and MP3 releases.
FLAC files are no that big in the end! With the best compression, a whole album can fit well in 250/300 MB (or less, depending on the number of tracks).
On the other hand, as Kevin said MP3 files are important too, cause people will certainly want to put brb music on their iPods and most of them won't be able to convert from flac to mp3. For this specific reason, releasing only FLACS would result in a remarkable drop in popularity for bRB, which in turn wouldn't do any good to the group.
Plus, bootlegs can't all be recorded with lossless quality... in fact MOST bootlegs are recorded in poor to very-poor quality so it'd be pointless to make them FLACs!

Of course, with such file sizes, we couldn't afford to use Rapidshare (unless you wanna split every file in ten thousand rar's)... let alone an FTP server (for maintenance costs). I believe we should upload all the material to MegaUpload. It has a 1GB upload limit so all our releases would fit great in there (except for potentially REALLY BIG HD BOOTLEGS I doubt we'll ever see). It supports multi-uploading and also has an auto HTTP/FTP fetch thingie which would do great for uploading. Unfortunately the latter is only for premium users...

Thank you guys for contributing to this topic. I thought you'd already forgotten about it 

[Dean]

As much as I love full HD rips, I'd personally still be much more inclined to download stuff in Xvid format, due to the smaller filesize. Sure the quality isn't as good, but it's still perfectly watchable, and in Australia and I'm sure many other countries, we don't have many ISP's that give a decent amount of bandwidth.
Ideally, what I'd love to see (at least until Xvid IS obsolete, and full HD rips are the norm) are the full HD rips available for download, but also an option to download a smaller Xvid rip. I understand that this makes nearly twice as much work, but if it's feasible, that would be much much more ideal, that way everyone is happy.

[shitman]

If by "XviD" you mean an SD, DVD-like video, then ok. But still encoded in x264.

XviD as a codec is theoretically obsolete, though it's still very popular due to the fact that it's included in the 2005 ("fucking-old") Scene Rules and that DVD/XviD players have obtained discrete popularity throughout the years.

Unfortunately The Scene still thinks, as you can well read on the "fucking-old" "x264 Scene Rules" that x264 should only be used for HD rips... but on the other hand, they also think DVDrips should be limited to 700MBs and split if bigger than that (horror! horror!) when today's internet speed would allow for much more (both in terms of practicality and quality, cause a single 1.4GB release is way more practical than two 700MB files and would certainly allow for better quality [check out XviD-Unseen])

About making parallel HD and SD releases, that would be on the ripper, cause it takes a shitload of time to encode x264 stuff (not that XviD is any faster...). Or (much more feasible) we might have a person to just re-encode HD releases to SD so that the latter become available within a couple of days since the original release. We find someone with good hardware, a good internet connection and plenty of time, teach him how to do it and just let him do the job.  Sounds good to you guys?

Thanks again for contributing we're gonna get bRB back up and running!

[EDIT]
PS: still no activity here
http://blinkrebels.blogspot.com/

[EDIT II]
Figured these might be useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDTV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)

[Dean]

That's all fair enough. I'm not a video guru, by any means. But if you look at the DVDRips you find on torrent trackers these days, (look at any aXXo rips), they're all still 700mb avi files, in SD. I was under the impression that they are Xvid. Or are they encoded with x264? Not that it makes much difference. Just thinking that for people in countries where internet access is still fairly primitive compared to Europe and USA, it would be nice to have the option. But obviously, like you said, that's up to how much work the rippers want to put in. Maybe when you get the website up and running, you should run a poll?

[bart.]

Shitman, I think it's great how bRB is trying to live by the scene rules.
That really made bRB a 'group' to me.

Anyway, about the release formats..
x264 is awesome indeed and I guess it all depends on the source.
As you may have seen, there are a couple of HD bootlegs from blink shows on youtube already.
If this continues, there probably will be a lot of HD bootlegs of the new blink tour.
Releasing these bootlegs in 720p x264 would be a good idea, I think 1080i/p is a little too big.
And I think it's still a good idea to release SD video files. +- 40 MB files, near DVD quality for the people with download limit/no hd capable computer or people who just don't need huge ass HD files.
Or, another option, is to release only one format. x264 files with DVD resolution.
By the way, I've got no clue about the scene rules for video at this point, so these formats will probably not be included in those scene rules you mentioned.


Another thing: re-encoding.:

Or (much more feasible) we might have a person to just re-encode HD releases to SD so that the latter become available within a couple of days since the original release.

NOOOOOOO.
Re-encoding is something I wouldn't do.
Just encode to HD from the original source AND encode to SD from the original source.
Re-encoding will lead to a quality loss, I believe.

And about the MP3/FLAC thing, you had a good point, saying that most sources are only MP3.
Best thing would be to release these bootlegs without transcoding them.
And if there's ever a lossless source for a bootleg, you can release both FLAC and MP3.

Anyway, are there some spots open in bRB?
I might be interested in joining.

[shitman]

@dean:I'm not much into encoding either, I mean, I know about all the shit but I'm not that familiar with the best settings or the best techniques you gotta use in order to pack a nice file

Most DVDRips you find on the net (including aXXo's) are SD, encoded with XviD cause that's the standard. Now, I'm not saying they're crap (I LOVE aXXo's rips), the point is that if they had been encoded with x264, we could've had better quality at the same file size.

The poll idea is good, but I'm not in charge of the site so I'll not be able to put it up...

@bart: It's hard to get 1080i/p bootlegs. Most of the bootlegs are cammed ones and cams go up to 720p (except for professional ones). The only 1080i/p bootlegs would be the ones ripped off TV, these always contain less than 3 songs (i.e. we wouldn't have any BIG file anyway)...
@bart: DVD quality = SD quality
@bart: just a few years ago (until about 2005) people would encode "VCD" TVrips from raw TV signal (mostly 320*240) and most of the results were highly satisfying.
Afterward, when people started downscaling their VCD releases from SD signal, results became excellent (take a look at the 2003 MTV album Launch VCD release from bRB, just perfect).
Getting SD quality videos down from HD quality videos would produce only a negligible, very negligible quality loss...

---

Recapping ( ), the following should be bRB guidelines:
all the points are obviously open for discussion


How do we operate?
- Website with (eventually encrypted or somehow hidden) Megaupload links

Video:
- HD (highest possible res) encoded in x264
- SD parallel releases encoded in x264 (eventually encoded by someone else)
- SD (or lower) for low-quality rips in x264

Audio:
- FLAC (and parallel MP3) for official releases (albums and live albums) or lossless bootlegs
- MP3 for low-quality rips and bootlegs

[shitman]

Further suggestion:
to keep ALL releases alive, we could make one BIG torrent and post it on The Pirate Bay. Of course, it will not be very easy to update this presumed torrent with all the new releases... so we could make a new one each month with all the new stuff, though keeping as much of the folder structure intact as possible. It'd be also cool to include instructions for seeders of, for instance, last week's torrent, on how to update their local directory structure in order to seed the newly created torrent

Let's try to keep this thread up! C'mon guys!

[LeedsAdam]

Here are a few releases I have. not many though

[Julian Casablancas]

weird, i have the exact same releases as you do