Introduced by my friend Bart in this recent upload http://whatthemovie.com/shot/32200 let's have a new discussion about a new and powerful late behaviour I noticed in New Subs since few weeks : more and more uploads taken from Divx/avi/whatever/not-DVD files. I think it's not uneasy to recognize them, you can find so many artefacts in the shot, especially in the united color areas, and sharpness is really low.
The rules are clear about uploads : "Use the original DVD to take the snapshot; We won't accept low quality!"
But I guess we are not a lot of people voting against low quality these past weeks. I can understand it's not a very nice job, to look like Bad Santa and judjing the good or bad respect of rules. Nevertheless I think it's necessary to show people that WTM is clearly a cinema lovers website, but not a friendly place for shots coming from illegal downloads.
So I really hope few more volunteers are going to join us to reject low quality shots and emphasize all very good shots taken from DVD.
I'm not sure it is so easy to discriminate between a dvd shot and a good divx or numerical recording from digital tv. I have many many dvd showing a very poor quality. On the other hand, the divx I generate from good dvd are almost as good as the original. That's exactly the same with mp3. Good mp3 carefuly encoded are very close to the original cd quality.
yep i agree with efji, you can't judge the source by the quality of the shot alone, i as well have lousy quality dvd's, and mind you i've got 300+ disks, so i know quality can vary a hell of a lot, for example http://whatthemovie.com/shot/27485 , i ripped this from dvd, quality sucks ass!! i'm sure there's a much better quality available now, just upped it for the contest. And! i believe it is possible to purchaise and download legal divx's nowadays (correct me if i'm wrong here) but the divx quality nowadays seems to be getting better and better! And what about these blu-ray rips? you can never tell... think it's just better to judge on quality alone and forget about the source! But i also think we shouldn't be too harsh.. not everyone has the latest restored digital altered and whatever they do to it, just laying around..
I think lepaposaure is talking about *blatantly* pirated movies. A trained eye can easily tell the difference between a poor quality DVD transfer and a low bitrate divx, believe me. divx/mpeg encoding leaves obvious artefacts on blocks of solid colour etc.. you can especially tell the difference when images uploaded have the DIVX logo on them! Also shots from inglourious basterds, up etc.. films which have only just been released in cinemas. And the point about legally obtaining divx (c'mon we arent stupid, we know where divx's generally come from ;) ) is a moot point, the rules state the image must be taken from DVD, "we wont accept low quality".
Also, if I see an image with a comment "dvd quality" on a moderm film, it instantly rings alarm bells. Why would you need to say that on a film like Iron Man, or Transformers, or Austin Powers etc.. ? I can understand having to put that on a old classic film with a poor master, but modern films (unless grainy/different for artistic purposes) should not require that tag. Recently, if I own the film posted, and I see that comment, I always take a shot of that image myself, and its almost always better than the one uploaded. I will aways tell the uploader too, and link to a picture that IS actually DVD quality. LePap has done this a few times also.
Putting "DVD quality" on an image which obviously isnt, is quite frankly insulting the intelligence of the users of this site, and does not make your image immune from deletions.
And yes LePaposaure, there has definitely been an increase in the amount of uploads of obviously pirated material recently, people need to sort it out. If you are going to post a pirated movie, at least make it such good quality that we cant tell :P
Not angry. Overly verbose as usual, but not angry. I was just backing up lePaposaure after people seemed to be defending pirated shots. I agree with what he says thats all. It seems you cannot tell the difference between debate and anger :P
Mods dont have a vote delete button btw, just an insta-nuke, which I do not use unless absolutely necessary, I am sure you can appreciate.
I think it really got too much here with those shots. The problem is... I don't have a DVD of every movie posted here so I'm not always able to make a shot myself to check if it's a DVD shot or not, I just can do it with the movies I have, and even then I don't have always the time to do so. But, what also helps and what I often do to check if a shot is taken from DVD is to go to the movie's site here and check the other uploaded shots for quality and especially for the size (the pixels and black bars, how big are they and so on)... and if I see a difference to all those shots it's often a good help to filter out shots not taken from DVD. The quality of course is another point... I agree you can tell by some points if it's a DVD shot or not... some areas and colours and sharpness and so on. But I know there are some movies where it's a bit different, Ultraviolet and Casshern for example, they are blurred on purpose and the grading is kind of special, so with movies like this it's harder to tell if it's a DVD shot... All in all I think it's hard, I don't want to vote for deletion by mistake so I'm normally very careful with the button unless I'm really certain it's not a DVD shot. But of course I don't want to support uploaders of "illegal" shots. It's unfortunately not easy to filter out the black sheeps.
Edit: omg I can't stop laughing :D I have to say, the best upload Deviant ever made ;)
'All in all I think it's hard, I don't want to vote for deletion by mistake so I'm normally very careful with the button unless I'm really certain it's not a DVD shot. But of course I don't want to support uploaders of "illegal" shots. It's unfortunately not easy to filter out the black sheeps.'
Exactly the same for me. I only vote for deletion if I'm absolutely sure it's not from DVD/Bluray.
Totally agree with them00ch too, only problem is I don't have a trained eye for quality checks (same for aspect ratio)
efji, I dont think you read my post. to quote myself again:
"A trained eye can easily tell the difference between a poor quality DVD transfer and a low bitrate divx"
and
"If you are going to post a pirated movie, at least make it such good quality that we cant tell :P "
The emphasis being on "POOR QUALITY" and "LOW BITRATE". Obviously I'm not condoning illegally downloading movies, your images should all come from DVD, but your 3 are all good quality, so we cant tell. The issue we are talking about is images which are extremely low bit rate, artefacted to hell, and look like they were captured on a Sega Master System.
Btw, as you admitted at least two of them werent from a DVD, I've deleted them all to be on the safe side ;)
That's why I'm inviting people into this discussion. Of course we all have uploaded shots from Divx (yes, me too...), but I guess we had chosen only good quality. And of course, as efji is subtly showing in his three shots selection, some "Not-DVD" images can be as good as medium true-DVD shots. When I ask more volunteers for Del-votes, it's only for ugly-awfull-artifactfest shots, for which we need more "players-moderators", at my opinion. PS : Good work, Deviant for http://whatthemovie.com/shot/32517 and thanks themOOch for support !
Maybe I also should say that after so many votes for deletion have been ridiculous and we had those discussions in here, we got what we wanted and the people thought twice before they voted and got more careful. That's good, but I think that's also a reason why some people now maybe don't vote for a deletion instantly and maybe instead of it just rate the shot low.
http://whatthemovie.com/shot/32517 , how the hell did anyone ever dare uploading a shot like this!! way to go deviant! think you deserve somesort of special prize! , i also commented on this one a long time ago, http://whatthemovie.com/shot/79 , 79th shot ever.. guess things were a little different in those days... i think it should stay were it is for now! i could sent one of the mods a better version but i'm sure they could take it themselves! everyone has a copy of that one right?
@Bazzy: About that link to number 79. you can't judge the source by the quality of the shot alone, i believe it is possible to purchaise and download legal divx's nowadays (correct me if i'm wrong here). i think we shouldn't be too harsh.. not everyone has the latest restored digital altered and whatever they do to it, just laying around..
;)
(yes you're right its a blatant download / poor copy)
You should have picked an unreleased screener like Inglorious Basterds :P That'd be the perfect example, so nope, close but no cigar ^^
@M00ch: Besides, we all know what VOD quality is... :( I've seen a paid copy of "The Dark Knight" and it was, to put it simply, a joke. The guy expected something close to a dvd-r, with AC3 and whatnot.
I agree with LePaposausre and must say i'm quite bothered by the quality of some of the shots uploaded. Seems like the number of bad quality shots is increasing. I would like if something more is done about this. But I'm not going to vote for deletion for all of them.
Yeah, well, from living in France (I don't know about the others, so...), you know there's a lot of crap companies out there. You should see my DVD of Running Man... I've had better DivX than that ! You've seen the Doctor Who DVDs from Canal+ ? The quality isn't better than a 5 years old DivX (thus, I bought the BBC's ones :D ). Yet I understand what you mean. Anyhow, downloaders. At least use Matroska containers...
@ Deviant Yeah, me neither. And I don't dl 'cause that's a bad thing. And I don't have hundreds of DVDs at my place. And I don't go twice a week to the movie theater. And I have gonad sore ;P
And talking about that, I just got a pic deleted, bad quality related :D
I noticed a very big difference between pics taken with VLC, Totem, WMP and Gom player.
@ Redvex The quality was a joke because it's VoD ? Well, once again, no use to go that far, check lots of DVDs out there. Worst, low budget movies (I don't blame, on the contrary)... Yeah, there's lots of jokes out there, and not even killing ones ;P
BTW, I have q auestion. What are the settings of the jpg compression ? Because this can alter the quality a lot. Well, it is obviously well tuned, but you know, I'm curious (I actually don't see a lot of differences from jpg to jpg, but a few from png to jpg)
Just larger files for nothing. Remember that the mpeg on dvd is already compressed, usually with a quite high compression factor. The jpeg factor between 0 and 100 has a steep slope near 100. A typical image is 2.5 times lighter at 90 than 100, and again 2 times smaller at 80. I think 90 is an upper bound, and 80 should be enough for most dvd sources. Don't make WTM hard drives collapse and, above all, WTM bandwidth explode (which seems to happen time to time).
I've voted for deletion on a still that looks really badly compressed to me... now my deletion vote is gone? This isn't from DVD, is it? It's full of artifacts all over.