This is a short cheatsheet to help you determine whether a release from Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix contains the lossless/untouched (as in no further loss of quality compared to what the streaming services provide) video/audio or not, since tagging is not always consistent and therefore it's an unreliable way to determine this alone.
In most cases, non-lossless rips from these services are screen captures (which, when done by professional releasers, should be high quality and contain little to no glitches – see the history section for details), but in some cases they may be simply reencoded from the untouched stream, for example to crop black bars or reencode from a higher-quality stream to achieve better quality. Also, generally the audio is untouched even when the video is not, but that's not always the case. There is no easy way to differentiate these cases, so I'm only describing what to look for in regards to lossless video streams, and for those, you can be quite certain the audio is losslessly preserved as well. Internal releases on private trackers such as BTN generally provide such information about the video and audio, but in practice these notes rarely make their way to other sites.
You will need a program called MediaInfo to view the relevant information in files. Some sites already post the output of the program, but you may want to verify it yourself after downloading the files to make sure.
- Release tag:
AMZN.WEB-DL/Amazon WEB-DLAMZN.WEBRip/Amazon WEBRip(old or mistagged releases)WEB-DL DD+/WEB-DL AAC2.0 AVC/WEB-DL DD5.1 AVC(TrollHD)WEB(scene releases)
- Format profile:
- 1920×1080: [email protected]
- 1280×720 / 960×540: [email protected]
- 640×480 / 704×396: [email protected]
Note that the dates given below are approximate.
- Constant bitrate
- 1920×1080: 10 Mbps
- 1280×720: 6 Mbps
- 640×480 / 720×404: 2 Mbps
- No mention of x264 version or encoding settings
- Variable bitrate
- Maximum bitrate:
- 1920×1080: 15 Mbps
- 1280×720: 4.5 Mbps
- 960×540: 2.995 Mbps
- 720x480: 2.4 Mbps
- 640x480 / 704×396: 1.8 Mbps
- Average bitrate is often significantly lower than the maximum for animated content.
- Tagged
WEB-DL DD+by TrollHD
x264 core 148 r2623 d5b2374- Encoding settings:
- 1920×1080 / 1280×720:
crf=18 - 960×540:
crf=19 - 720×480:
crf=20 - 640×480 / 704×396:
crf=22
- 1920×1080 / 1280×720:
Note that there is a gap here, no untouched rips were released for a while because the exploit was patched.
- No mention of x264 version or encoding settings
- Usually tagged
H.264rather thanx264
Note: Some videos, even new content, may use 2015 or 2016 video encoding settings, but E-AC3 audio (and subtitles, when available) are still included.
- Release tag:
HULU.WEB-DLHULU.WEBRip(old or mistagged releases)WEB(scene releases)
- Format profile:
- 1080p: [email protected]
- 720p: [email protected]
- No mention of x264 version or encoding settings
- Usually tagged
H264orH.264rather thanx264
- Release tag:
NF.WEB-DL/Netflix WEB-DLNF.WEBRip/Netflix WEBRip(old or mistagged releases)WEB(scene releases)
- 2160p:
- Note that Netflix doesn't have any H.264 stream for 4K, so untouched 4K rips will always be HEVC.
- Format profile: Main 10@L5@Main
- No mention of x265 or encoding settings
- 1080p and lower (H.264):
- Format profile:
- 1080p: [email protected]
- 720p: [email protected]
- 480p (720x480): [email protected]
*
x264 core 118orx264 core 148* Encoding settings: rc=2pass- Up to 7.5 Mbps (
bitrate=7500) for 1080p- The bitrate can even go as low as 3 Mbps for 1080p in some cases.
- Format profile:
This is a list of individual releasers and release groups known to be releasing untouched rips from one or more of the above services. Of course, this does not mean every release from them is untouched; you still need to check for the above signs.
Groups tagged (4K) have also untouched 4K rips in the past. Those are less common because the 4K streams are usually more protected.
aAFBIGINTCONVOYDEFLATEELUDEFIRETV(Amazon 2016)JAWNNEXTGENSTRiFE
ABMAJP69BTWCasStudioCinefeelCtrlSD,CtrlHDDAWNDONDRACULA(Amazon 2016)FGT(Amazon 2016)GoTherkzHorribleSubs(anime)- No source tag, most releases are from Crunchyroll.
iFLiX(Netflix SD)KiNGSMooi1990(German)monkeeMOZNTbNTGPLAYREADY(4K)RTNSiGMATrollSD,TrollHD,TrollUHD(4K)TVS(German)TVSmashQOQViSUMVLADvlaluk(Amazon 2016)Web4HD(Amazon 2016)
Let's start with P2P groups. Historically, on BTN, the WEB-DL tag was reserved for releases from iTunes, which has a long-standing public method to break its DRM, and WEBRip was used for rips from streaming services with weak or no DRM. When content from streaming services such as Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix started being released, since it wasn't possible to break their DRM, screen captures ("caps") were made instead. (These are generally done using a lossless HDMI capture card and then the 300–400 GB output is reencoded to a reasonable size. This can be done because HDCP is already broken.) But there was no explicit provision in the release name rules for this, so WEBRip was used.
Later, it became possible to circumvent the DRM used by those streaming services. There were two exploits specifically for Amazon, one in 2015 and one in 2016, and then in June 2017, untouched rips started surfacing from Hulu and Netflix as well, as the Widevine DRM itself, now used by all three streaming services, has been broken. However, since WEB-DL was reserved for iTunes, they were still tagged as WEBRip, which lead to confusion about which releases are untouched.
BTN has since then changed their rules to require WEB-DL instead of WEBRip for all untouched rips, and also iT.WEB-DL rather than plain WEB-DL for iTunes. New releases from reputable groups should be now clearly tagged, however there are sites like RARBG which still tag everything other than iTunes as WEBRip, and then there are many sites which just use the notation of whatever other site they got it from, so you may still need to look at the details to make sure.
As for the scene, starting from 2016, all untouched releases are tagged WEB, while captured/reencoded ones are tagged WEBRip. However, there are some releases before the standard was established tagged WEBRiP which are generally (if not always) untouched. In both cases, there is no source tag, so you need to check the NFO (it may or may not be mentioned there) or the MediaInfo to determine the source. The source may be anything including iTunes and network websites, not necessarily Amazon/Hulu/Netflix. iTunes releases require proof (screenshot of download in progress), so those are easy to identify.
What programs/sites do i use for these types of WEBRips?