What is "WEB-DL?"

[RobertX]

I've seen a lot of torrents that are "WEB-DLs."

What do they mean by that?

[Spud17]

A WEB-DL, according to wiki, is, 'a movie or TV show downloaded via an on-line distribution website (web download), such as iTunes. The quality is quite good since they are not re-encoded. The video (H.264) and audio (AC3/AAC) streams are usually extracted from the iTunes file and then remuxed into a MKV container without sacrificing quality. An advantage with these releases is that they mostly have no network logos on screen, just like BD/DVDRips.'

movie release types guide.

[RobertX]

Oh, I should have figured it out. I feel quite stupid.

Thanks!

[eAbyss]

Spud is correct but you need to be careful because many people will miss-label their releases (sometimes purposefully) as WEB-DLs when they are in fact WEB-RIPs.

WEB-RIPs unlike WEB-DLs are re-encoded to shrink the size, to remove DRM (because they don't know how to do it properly), or because it's the only way to capture a certain stream is to re-encode (e.g. Netflix rips). WEB-RIPs are actually lower quality than HDTV releases because you're re-encoding an already properly encoded and sized video while HDTV releases have far more information/detail to work with during the encoding process. A legitimate WEB-DL is second only to a BluRay rip in regards to quality and in many cases you wont really notice a difference between the two.

Just pay attention to the codec used to encode the video. A WEB-DL will always be encoded using H.264 while WEB-RIPs will use either x264 or the antiquated XviD.

[RobertX]

Thank you, and welcome to SuprBay, where a pirate site can survive a supernova, or a mislabelled torrent!