Join the LiNUX movie release group

The script in this directory is what I used to make this movie rip. You can see the entire step by step process by reading the text files in Info/. I made this script because I realized that I'm going to rip a lot of movies, and I want the whole process automated. So, I made this script. The script will:

* Encode a Blu-Ray Remux (~29000 kb/s) to (5000 kb/s) HEVC with (DTS audio (1536 kb/s)).

I settled for this video bitrate, and this encoder preset, after testing. I think this format gives the ideal quality while still having a pretty small file size. The HEVC codec allows this, and performs much better at any bitrate than the H264 codec, especially in 10-bit color depth (10 bpp (bits per pixel)), which is what the script is set to use. This quality is *good enough* while not sacrificing too much for the small file size. 5000 kbps video bitrate should be enough for all 1080p movies. Don't be surprised to see that HEVC encoding takes a long time. Of course, that time is only limited by how many CPUs you have available.

I choose the DTS audio format, because there's no encoding or compression needed. The audio track can just be extracted from the Blu-Ray Remux. All DTS-HD MA audio tracks contain a DTS track at their core. Audio doesn't take up much space anyway, so it increasingly makes no sense to compress it.

I decided that these settings gave the highest quality, while still not taking way too long to finish. x265 is a very CPU intensive encoder. So, it's worth running this script on a system with a good processor, like a gaming rig for example.

If you decide to use this script, you can become a part of this decentralized and completely anonymous release group. By using this script, you can make HEVC rips with excellent quality, and you only need to know one command. The ripping process will run as fast as HandBrake and your hardware can handle. The whole process is completely automated.

Read the script file and run it to get a better idea.

A few trademarks of this release group:

* Use of the new HEVC codec, which is superior and will replace AVC (H264)
* Always include a DTS audio track in the original language of the movie
* Always include all PGS subtitles from the Blu-Ray Remux input file
* Include at least one SRT subtitle in English

If we have multiple people simultaneously releasing movie rips on the public trackers, then we can improve the situation a lot, and basically flood (in a good way) the various BitTorrent tracker sites with good quality rips.

We, the people in this release group, will all be like independent nodes on a network, or different heads of a hydra. This release group doesn't rely on any single person. It's completely open sourced. The only criteria to be a member is *use the script*.

This idea makes a lot of sense to me, because you can get Linux for free, and the various tools used by the script are also open source, and can easily be installed in the package manager in your distribution of choice.

You can download Blu-Ray Remuxes by searching for them on:

* torrentz2.eu
* search.torrents.io
* thepiratebay.org

However, it's easier to find Blu-Ray Remuxes that are seeded if you're a member of a private torrent site, that has its own tracker. If you're a part of the BitTorrent filesharing community, then you might already be a member of such a private site that is focused on movies.

You can of course also rip Blu-Ray discs yourself, and then feed those files to this script.

By being multiple people, we can rip many more movies at once and at a faster pace, and basically gain a presence on the scene. We are limited by the laws of physics, when it comes to how fast one PC can do the video encoding, so we need multiple PCs. Luckily, the Internet allows us to have this communication and agreement anonymously.

So, anyone can be a part of this release group, and it's all completely free.

About the script itself:

The script is also subject to change and improvement, as is the norm in the open source world. But, please, if changing it, state clearly what was changed, why and when, in the comments. I'm not going to bother releasing the script under a specific open source license, because this is the world of piracy, and we generally don't care about licenses. A script is good because it's by it's very definition open source in nature. Anyone can read the code and understand what it does, since it's not in a compiled or binary form, but in text form. I based my script on the scripting language of the Bash (GNU Bourne-again shell) terminal, since it's the most commonly used. I use Linux because, well, obviously. Why wouldn't I?

If you're going to do a lot of video encoding it makes sense to do that on a dedicated system. In those cases, there's clearly not any need to run Windows, since every step of the movie ripping process can be done by open source software. Using this script to rip movies is a very clean and efficient to do it in a Linux terminal. You don't need GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for this stuff. In fact, they're just in the way. You just have more control on the command-line, and it's easy to fine-tune everything. That's what the script handles for you, and you basically only have to press one key, Enter, to run the script. TUIs (text-based user interfaces) use less system resources.

You can still have a desktop on your movie ripping machine. In fact, most Linux distributions come with a desktop environment. I recommend GNOME myself. As the script says, it's a good idea to run the script in a background TTY. A TTY is basically a terminal shell, and TTY stands for "teletypewriter". Any number between 1 and 7 will be fine, which is usually where the login manager and desktop session run. To switch TTY, you just press Ctrl + Alt + F#, and Ctrl + Alt + F7 to get back to the desktop.

When you run the script in the background like that, you can easily pause it (kill -s 20 PID) from the desktop, and later resume it (kill -s 18 PID). You find the PID (process ID) of the running HandBrake process by running:

ps -C HandBrakeCLI -o pid,args

The names of the signal numbers 20 and 18, are SIGTSTP and SIGCONT. Run this command to list the names of all signals:

kill -l

If, for some reason, you want to change the default language for the audio track, you can just change the $lang variable to the language code of your choice. As long as there's a DTS-HD MA track available (for your language) in the input file, you can rip the movie. You can have only one audio track, and it's always supposed to be the language in which the movie was originally made, no matter what language it is. The script is set to include all subtitles found in the input file. We're always supposed to include at the very least English subtitles in SubRip (SRT) format. The default audio language is set to English, because let's face it, we're going to be ripping a lot of Hollywood movies.

Run this command to list all language codes:

mkvmerge --list-languages

The name of the release group is: LiNUX

Join me. I'll be watching to see if other rips by this release group start showing up on the BitTorrent search engines.