I’ve seen a few throughout my life at friend’s houses as a kid during the age of Limewire. Typically they were pretty good quality even though you’d see the odd person get up from their seat or hardcoded subtitles. Lately I’ve been curious about the history behind them and how they came to be.
Have there been well known release groups similar to the game cracking scene?
Have they always been mostly from one region?
Are they released strategically for one reason or another?
Have there been hidden methods to bust groups after a release such as steganography?
I’d be down to hear any facts about it you find interesting, stories, and if you have any articles or videos about the subject.
In Italy between the movies were screening in the cinemas and dvd releases there was a wait time of 3 months. Exactly three months. The most common way of piracy was streaming websites (like cineblog nowadays) pestered with ads. Before the age of WEBDL most people who couldn’t pay for the cinemas and everybody who wanted to have lots to talk about pop arts and trends was watching cam rips. The quality of cam rips were ever increasing every year with specialized forums discussing hardware to do it. I remember you could find everything from low quality phone cams (we are talking 2006 phone cameras) rips to tv quality cameras pointed to the screen from inside the cinemas with tripods.
Project X was such a hyped up movie in Italy that I personally witnessed a bunch of people recording it in the cinemas and everybody at school was sharing the phones on which the movie was recorded during lessons.
To be honest camrips started to disappear during and after covid, but even now for very famous movies like Barbie and Hoppeneimer of Marvel stuff people are still downloading those.
For reference: