The Scene Pyramid

Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 9/26/2011

Situation: an English group releases a new movie ( DVDRip )
Take into consideration:
- In this example the supplier didn’t first drive home with the copy, but apparently uploaded from work, which is highly unlikely. But how long does it take him to get home in the example? 5 hours? 2? I therefor didn’t take it into consideration.
- There was no delay. Noone was busy, no work, no school, everything started right away.
Step 1. 0 hour.
A ‘supplier’ gets access to a new movie, he quickly ‘!dupe’ checks a IRC bot run by a friend of the group he works for. In less than a second, this irc bot searches for him the entire scene history of 4.5 million releases!
Step 2. 10 seconds.
He confirms the movie is not yet released, so he puts the disk into his pc and copies it’s contents to his hard disk. Once that is done, he starts the ssl upload to the private FTP of his group.
Step 3. 15 minutes.
The upload is done.
The group is notified in their private IRC channel either by a automated script connected to their ftp or the supplier himself.
A second dupe check is done to make sure it’s still not released yet, and the ‘ripper’ gets alarted; the race in on!
Step 4. 20 minutes.
The ripper FXPs/downloads the release to his ripbox, does a quick check and starts the encode.
Step 5.
The wait. It takes time to encode and you know your competitors could release it any moment if you’re in bad luck.
Step 6. 2 hours and 50 minutes.
The encode is done.
Sometimes the ripper checks for common problems like bad colors, errors in the sound, ghosting and other worries, but much more often due to the ‘rush’ to be first, he takes a 10 second peek and off it goes. After all, in the scene there is an advanced system to report and fix problems, something non-sceners do not benefit from, who usually remain stuck with the releases that had problems.
Now the encode is done, the ripper loads the file in the group’s auto-packer, which automaticly grabs the information on the movie from IMDB and automatically writes the NFO file while the movie gets packed. A few seconds later and it’s done.
Step 7. 2 hours, 50 minutes and a few seconds.
The movie gets automaticly FXP’d to one of the group’s ‘affils’ (affiliate sites), and from there FXP’d to the other affils. Since topsites generally aren’t any slower than several hundred Mb/s shared with only a few dozen others, and more often than not several Gbit/s, this aswell takes only a matter of seconds.
Step 8. 2 hours, 50 minutes and a few more seconds.
Final dupe check before ‘pre’, while watching the live announces of all and every new release in the scene, one of the members of the group writes the command to release, immediatly their auto-bot tells all the sites they are active in the release is now official (aka ‘pre’)!
Step 9. 2 hours, 51 minutes (What you expected me to write? ‘a few more, more seconds’? :p)
Tense? Now the madness really starts.
Right when the command is given, the bots on affil topsites send the command to all addpre channels on all nuke nets, dozens of bots add the release to their database, and within less than an second, the release is announced all over the scene!
At the same time, dozens of ‘racers’ spread the release to all topsites in the scene that want it at roaring speed, within 3 minutes the release is all over the scene!
Competing groups that lost the race by an inch immediatly grab the release to check it for errors to ‘proper’ it.
Step 10. 2 hours, 54 minutes
Final step for the group; they now grab their own release and check it thoroughly for errors. They do now, after it is released, because they already won ‘the race’ which matters greatly in the highly competitive environment of the scene. They also check now, because if they find problems, they can fix them themselves instead of having a other group release a PROPER on them.
Step 10. 2 hours, 55 minutes
Several of these topsites [1] are used by ‘leakers’ to bring the releases to you; they get send to their own private ftp and from there usually send to a seedbox on a private tracker.
Step 11. 3 hours, 10 minutes
Most private trackers now have the file.
Step 11. 3 hours, 20 minutes
Taken from private trackers like these, it starts to appear on Warez Forums and Usenet.
Also by now, the groups have likely checked the release for errors, and if there any problems, you might be stuck with a bad release if you never found out something was wrong untill you watch it
Step 12. 3 hours, 40 minutes
It starts to appear on public trackers.
Step 13. 4:30-5 hours
It starts to appear on classic P2P.
[1] Small sidenote: more often than not the owner of the FTP does not know of this behavior by one of it’s members, if they did most would stop it.

Source: http://www.rlslog.net/the-scene-s01e01-the-release-process/#more-114592