Standard (warez)

Standards in the warez scene are defined by groups of people who have been involved in its activities for several years and have established connections to large groups. These people form a committee, which creates drafts for approval of the large groups. Outside the warez scene, often referred to as p2p, there are no global rules similar to the scene, although some groups and individuals could have their own internal guidelines they follow.

In warez distribution, all releases must follow these predefined standards to become accepted material. The standards committee usually cycles several drafts and finally decides which is best suited for the purpose, and then releases the draft for approval. Once the draft has been e-signed by several bigger groups, it becomes ratified and accepted as the current standard. There are separate standards for each category of releases. All groups are expected to know and follow the standards.

There are rules of naming and organizing files, rules that dictate how a file must be packaged and an nfo file, that contains required information, must be added with the content.

The first part of a standards document usually defines the format properties for the material, like codec, bitrate, resolution, file type and file size. Creators of the standard usually do comprehensive testing to find optimal codecs and settings for sound and video to maximize image quality in the selected file size.

When choosing file size, the limiting factor is the size of the media to be used (such as 700MB for CD-R). The standards are designed such that a certain amount of content will fit on each piece of media, with the best possible quality in terms of size. If more discs are required for sufficient quality, the standard will define the circumstances where it is acceptable to expand to a second or third disc. Newer video standards moved away from the size constraints and replaced them with a quality based alternative such as the use of CRF.

New codecs are usually tested annually to check if any offer any conclusive enhancement in quality or compression time. In general, quality is not sacrificed for speed, and the standards will usually opt for the highest quality possible, even if this takes much longer. For example, releases using the Xvid encoder must use the two-pass encoding method, which takes twice as long as a single pass, but achieves much higher quality; similarly, DVD-R releases that must be re-encoded often use 6 or 8 passes to get the best quality.

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