Comparing YIFY, SPARKS, ANOXMOUS, LTT, PUBLICHD, VISION, KINGDOM

[s1raz1]

Flickslick you have nothing to worry about, your rips are great, perfect size and quality wise, any doubt just DL your Gravity rip and try to find a pixels on the darkness ;D

[gosan]

Hi NIK,

I registered on the site Just to Thank You for your work. I wish you would have used the Same Scene for all of your Comparisons. Also, if you still have your Clips ... may be include a 20-30 Second Clips of each because the actual Video playback would give us a Better Feel for the Comparison.

Thanks again,

G!

[RobertX]

A takeaway for YIFY-team is how they are sacrificing audio quality for a few extra KBs.

You can always argue that you have subtitles for those who are privileged in accessing fourth-grade education.

[NIK]

You could argue much more persuasively, given the dominance of the Top 100 chart by YIFY-team, that the takeaway for every other team is that nobody notices or gives a fuck about the "quality" they claim to squeeze in to the "few extra KBs" so they should stop wasting their time and their downloader's bandwidth.

Alternatively, and most sensibly of all, you could argue that the takeaway for everyone is that consistency is more important than either quality or size. If people know that your next upload will be of a similar quality to your last upload they can judge for themselves whether they want to download it or not.

[DavidGGG]

Surprised to stumble upon this thread when I googled Anoxmous (this is actually the 8th hit in Google for Anoxmous!) wondering if he's still active. I'm the one who made the upload you're discussing.

I did the same exercise for "Guardians of the Galaxy" with uploaded screens, in which you could say Anoxmous "won" (depending on your sound preferences etc) and let it be noted Anoxmous is one of the most dependable rippers and I wish he comes back:

https://kat.cr/screenshots-guardians-of-...55723.html

Regarding your comments first of all I have to say: My main contribution is to upload representative screenshots for anyone to check out, but it seems none of you bothered to look at them. The text is there to give data in numbers for sound & video, plus my personal conclusion at the end. There is not one rip that fits everybodys prefs. But one thing I was hoping for is for people to open their eyes and not think bigger is necessarily better.

Some comments on what you say here:

It is certainly fair to compare a 720p rip to a 1080p rip, BR or BD. BR often gives negligible deterioration. Theoretically it might be unfair to compare two rips with vastly different bitrate, or BD to BR, but empirically I find this is not the case. Larger rips are NOT always better and that's one of my main points which some of you haven't bothered to investigate properly. If you read what I wrote on "Guardians...", Anoxmous manages to get virtually indistinguishable video quality in his 2.35GB rip compared to the 8.74GB rip from SPARKS. Not to say it is never the best choice to get a rip that is 5, 10 or 20GB but not in this case.

YIFY, which I watched tons of times and almost always was very happy with, usually has a 720p ~1GB and a 1080p ~2GB rip of each movie. Many times the difference between the two was close to negligible. Fact is, some movies look good even with high compression while some don't. For the same reason a carefully selected screenshoot says almost it all. The videos tht require the highest bitrate of all are those with much noise. The h264 encoder actually doesn't handle noise better than older codecs like MPEG4 part 2 (common for xvid, i e most "AVI files") and you often end up with very high bitrates before you're content. Typically old movies have more noise and especially in "epic" type movies it bothers you more if not handled well, but many newer movies have much noise as well. At the other end of the scale there's animated movies for which 720p ~500MB h.264 often is close to being indistinguishable from the original BD. And I usually accept slightly lower quality for e g a police chase movie than a major big screen blockbuster like Gravity or Guardians.

Regarding using screenshots for comparison: Long ago I used video samples thinking there could be a difference depending on what type of frame (I/P/B) and if there's fast or slow movement. But in reality I never saw any differences for those reasons. One should select a screenshot that includes both "texture" (like hair or close-up of textile fabric) and "small things with sharp edges or lines"; the latter looks poor with low resolution and the former with low bitrate. I usually try to find a frame with a human face (half-figure or head) in good light, there you have the hair, often textile, and the details of the face for "texture" and for sharpness you have the eyes and often details on hats etc.

The only noteable thing missing in such a comparison I find is what I call "nuance deficiancy", a phenomenon often most noteable in nighttime images (even in original DVDs) when you are supposed to see the background gradually going from a dark nuance to a slightly less dark one, but due to the codec you have only a few nuances with clear bounaries between them. This occurs not only for dark images, e g I encoded "American Sniper" as 1080p using merely 800kbps getting a great result with the exception of the sand storm scenes which are only for a few minutes. One could wish the encoder was improved for nighttime shots (like use a flag for when it's all dark and then get a new set of nuances). The sand torm is not exactly the same issue but it would help to cut out those few minutes, encode just them with the maybe 2500k it needs there, and then join it all together. Or wish for more settings in the encoder.

One thing that annoys me a bit is the ignorance when people think 720p is always better than a DVD rip or 1080p better than 720p. DVDs are since many years usually anamorphic which for European (PAL) 2.35:1 means effectively 1354x576 (although "oblong pixels") which is very comparable to 720p (1280x544). And a 1080p rip with hard compression may look worse than 720p of the same size. Here's one example of a rip I made where I ended up choosinb not 720p or 1080p but 960x416:

https://kat.cr/the-killer-elite-1975-blu...95430.html

Regarding multi-pass: I don't know how many passes YIFY do but the quality to me suggests more than one. I usually do two. In general I do believe it is not hard for most people with some technical interest and stubbornness to use a tool like Handbrake and get high quality rips. My tip is to rip out a few seconds with MKVmerge, encode it in Handbrake for different bitrates and resolutions, then choose one for the final encode.

At the moment, the biggest publicly available release group must be ETRG who often do great work but with very low consistency, mixing xvid with h.264 and DVDSCR with BDrips, no big problem for me but confusing to most people.

For the downloaders longing fo a replacement for YIFY I think the answer is that you have to learn the names of several dependable but smaller RGs. Here's a few great ones that come to mind: ShAaNiG, MKVcage, Ganool, Sujaidr, Playnow, Ozlem, ETRG (only if it says BD/BR/HD and not xvid, and watch the comments). A bit big: JYK, RARBG, VISION, CHD. Probably extinct but tons of old rips still out there: Anoxmous, Tlf, WAF, YIFY. There are also some good x.265 rips nowadays if you're willing to switch to e g Pot Player. Sure I missed some, tips are welcome of course. Someone should start a site similar to YIFY's which filters out these rippers from Kickass and Pirate Bay and presents them YIFY style! I know there ae a few attempts but those are lame.

In the words of Forrest Gump "That's all I have to say about that". Keep up the good work and good luck to ya - you're needed more than ever now when many rippers and sites have gone down.

PS I had no idea TPB had this forum. Let me say then I've had major problems uploading to TPB the last months since it never accepts the IMDB number of whatever strange number it wants, used to work, hope you fix it. Would have attached all the scheenshots here but not allowed, too big.

[willieaames]

I always download torrents from yify, dont know why people still complaining?