So you’ve just settled down with a loved one, some popcorn, and an illegally downloaded movie. But, like the other movies you’ve pirated, it looks like crap. Why do so many pirated videos look so bad?
Ugly Videos Are Bad for Everybody—Even Filmmakers
Video quality tends to take a backseat when piracy is involved. You get what you pay for, after all. But whatever way you look at it, the poor quality of illegal videos is bad for everybody, from viewers to filmmakers.
At a personal level, movies and shows are less impressive and engrossing when they look like a hunk of digital garbage. Actors and filmmakers intentionally take advantage of minute physical details, lighting, and color while shooting a film or movie, but those details are useless if they can’t be properly experienced.
And as it turns out, some corporate big-wigs are more concerned about this loss of experience than the financial ramifications of piracy. In 2013, HBO programming president Micheal Lombardo said that his biggest concern about piracy is that a show’s “production values” may not hold up in “purloined” (stolen) copies of the show. If these production values aren’t adequately conveyed to an audience, then the show’s reputation can be permanently damaged.
Need an example? Look at the final season of Game of Thrones. Some fans have complained that the final season’s episodes have “poor lighting,” but there’s a chance that many of these fans are merely watching illegal, low-quality copies of the show. As a result, the legacy of the show is damaged by piracy, and people who have never watched it (myself included) use “poor lighting” as an excuse to not watch Game of Thrones.
So why do these pirated videos look so nasty? Well, most pirates are impatient—or they have no idea what they’re doing.
Good Files Are Incorrectly Ripped or Recorded
Let’s say that you’ve just bought a Blu Ray copy of a beautifully remastered movie. Instead of inviting friends over to show off this movie, you decide to upload it to an illicit website (don’t do this). Where do you start? Well, you’ll pop the disc into your computer and drag the file onto your desktop, right?
You’re going to have some problems with that. For one, most Blu Ray disc readers have anti-ripping firmware that prevents the illegal distribution of movies. The other issue that you’ll run into is the file format (or the lack thereof). Remember, most commercial films come with menus, trailers, foreign language dubs, subtitles, and commentary. This mess of files can be expressed as a directory (with no apparent “movie file” to pull out) or an ISO file that can only be played by a physical or a software with a built-in virtual disc reader (DVDs usually contain ISO files, so pirates run into the same problem with DVDs).
So instead of trying to figure out this mess of files and archives, you (the pirate) may opt for an easier solution. Usually, this “easier” solution is to record the movie from your screen using a screen recording software, or by recording the output from your living room Blu Ray player via HDMI or RCA cable. As you can imagine, these paths lead to a loss in quality due to compression, hardware lag, recording resolution, and a mess of other problems. Your ultra high-res movie is now a lumpy hunk of crap.
