Plundering Pirates Complain Following Adoption Of MKV Container For TV Releases
You might not know it, but pirates in the digital age are an organized bunch. We're not talking about pirates with eye patches who sail the seas plundering ships and cities, but software pirates who rip movies and TV shows for illegal distribution on sites like The Pirate Bay and other torrent sharing portals. It's those types of pirates who are currently up in arms over recent changes made to a set of TV-release standards.
Yes, even pirates have rules they abide by, and they're actually quite extensive when it comes to how content should be ripped in HD and SD format. The new set of rules contains several changes intended to modernize things, though the one that has some pirates feeling perturbed is the requirement that all releases going forward be .MKV instead of .MP4.
"Suddenly everything (well many things is MKV instead of MP4," one pirate complained. "There is no way a whole bunch of encoders woke up today and suddenly decided to use MKV instead of MP4. Does anybody have any idea what's going on?"
The rule changes are supposed to be for what TorrentFreak calls "Scene groups," which are piracy groups that only share content between themselves and not with the public. Be that as it may, many of their releases end up leaked to public pirate sites, so the change in container format to .MKV is one that will affect the piracy community at large, not just so-called "topsites."
This isn't the first time a change in container format has caused an uproar among pirates. There were similar complaints in 2012 when the SD standards changed from .AVI to .MP4, which caused some pirates to threaten to ban certain sites.
The new rules went into effect yesterday.
Yes, even pirates have rules they abide by, and they're actually quite extensive when it comes to how content should be ripped in HD and SD format. The new set of rules contains several changes intended to modernize things, though the one that has some pirates feeling perturbed is the requirement that all releases going forward be .MKV instead of .MP4.
"Suddenly everything (well many things is MKV instead of MP4," one pirate complained. "There is no way a whole bunch of encoders woke up today and suddenly decided to use MKV instead of MP4. Does anybody have any idea what's going on?"
The rule changes are supposed to be for what TorrentFreak calls "Scene groups," which are piracy groups that only share content between themselves and not with the public. Be that as it may, many of their releases end up leaked to public pirate sites, so the change in container format to .MKV is one that will affect the piracy community at large, not just so-called "topsites."
This isn't the first time a change in container format has caused an uproar among pirates. There were similar complaints in 2012 when the SD standards changed from .AVI to .MP4, which caused some pirates to threaten to ban certain sites.
The new rules went into effect yesterday.
