I recently purchased a black Creative Zen Vision:M portable media player, in the hopes of preserving my sanity while on trans-Atlantic voyages to and from Baghdad, and keeping myself focused during my long and boring cardio workouts.

I previously owned a Creative Zen Micro, which I had a great experience with. However, I spent 20 hours en route home from Baghdad and found myself desperate for some video to pass the time; when I got home I discovered the Zen Vision:M was now widely available, and ordered one immediately.

I’ve not owned the unit long enough to form a lasting opinion, but I do love the screen (bright and clear), and I resent that the unit doesn’t come with a Video Out cable.

However, this post isn’t about the Vision:M. It’s about the video download scene, which has been around for years but until now I had no interest in. I—or, rather—a friend of mine has started looking around for series and movies to download for use on a portable media player, and found the scene rather interesting.

First, some staple sites to find torrents are Demonoid, IsoHunt, TorrentSpy, and PirateBay. However, it is of course not so easy as going to one of these sites, typing in ‘24 season 4’ or ‘Lost season 1’.

There are several factors to consider when evaluationg a potental download:

• Audio language
• Caption language
• Format
• Encoding
• Source
• Quality
• Composition

h2. Audio Language

The pirate video scene is worldwide, with a large non-US contingent. Thus, one cannot assume that one’s Battlestar Galactica pilot rip is in fact in English. Considerate posters will denote the language with ‘EN’ or ‘ITA’ or ‘EP’ or whatever, but many will not. My friend finds it useful to read the comments posted with the torrent’s listing in one of the sites above to check for anguished cries of “wtf, I don’t speak Esperanto dammit!” and save himself the hassle of downloading.

h2. Caption Language

For the same reason the audio language might not be the native language of the program, often my friend finds English audio with non-English subtitles, often added after capturing the original signal. Depending on the placement and formatting of the subtitles, and one’s individual tolerance for imperfection, this can range from amusing to untenable. Again, considerate posters will note the presence and language of subtitles, but my friend finds this is the exception, not the rule.

h2. Format and Encoding

If you are in possession of a review copy of the latest Star Wars movie and want to share it with your friends, one of the first and most important decisions you will make is how to convert from a DVD to a video file your friends can play. The decision of file format and encoding has significant impact on the viewers, and as with most highly technical and subjective decisions, sparks considerable pugilism amongst the rabble.

Formats my friend sees most often are:

• AVI — A generic container for audio and video information encoding by any of a number of possible codecs
• RMVB — RealMedia Variable Bitrate, a format and codec popular with video pirates due to the small file sizes and high quality it produces

Within the AVI format there are two popular encodings (also known as ‘codecs’):

• DivX — The original codec of choice for ripping DVDs, DivX is quasi-commercial and is out of favor with purists
• XVid — A newer open-source codec with performance similar to DivX

To play DivX or XVid files, you must have the appropriate codecs installed. On Windows, Windows Media Player can play DivX or XVid-encoding AVI files if you install the K-Lite Codec Pack. To play RMVB, download Real Alternative.

The Vision:M plays DivX and XVid natively; to play RMVB you have to jump through some hoops to convert to XVid. How to Convert RMVB is a pretty comprehensive article that covers the particulars.

h2. Source

A most high resolution video file is of no value if the source signal is fuzzy, distorted, etc. When pirates capture video from an original DVD, the source is ‘DVDrip’, which all things being equal is generally the best quality. Other sources are a camcorder in a movie theater (‘cam’), a professional video camera synced with the audio source in a theater (‘telesync’), or digitizing a video signal from a cable or satellite TV source.

My friend as a rule favors DVDrips, but will accept telesync or digitized TV signals if necessary. Cams are usually so bad it’s not worth the download time.

h2. Quality

Even when a format and encoding is selected, the compression level of the codec can be adjusted to produce smaller, lower-quality files, or larger, higher-quality files. This is a matter of preference, but my friend typically expects a movie file to be between 700MB and 2GB, with entire-season TV series between 2GB and 5GB.

Lower quality files will have more visual artifacts, lower resolution, a slower framerate, maybe some dropped frames, etc. Again, it’s simply a matter of preference.

h2. Composition

When downloading series, there are typically single episodes as well as an entire season (or even all seasons) in a single torrent. My friend prefers entire series at a time, as each episode is typically encoded the same way, and it’s more convenient than mixing and matching various episodes, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which ala carte episode downloading it worthwhile.

It’s great to be back in a country where ‘broadband’ means ‘faster than dialup’ rather than simply ‘more expensive than dialup’, which is the meaning of the team in Iraq. My friend can’t stand trying to find and leech torrents with a 60kbps link with 1000ms latency.