Standards in the scene are defined by group 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 for large groups. In organized warez distribution, all releases must follow these predefined standards to become accepted material. The standards comittee 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 signed by several bigger groups, it becomes ratified and accepted as the current standard. There are separate standards for each type of release categories.

Parent article: Warez

What is defined?

Format

First part of standards usually define the format properties for the material, like codec, bitrate, resolution, filetype and filesize. Creators of the standard usually do comprehensive testing to find optimal codec for sound and video to be used for best image quality for the agreed filesize. Limiting factor when choosing filesize is the size of used media. Certain amount of material should fit on used disk type at certain quality. New codecs are usually tested annually to check if any offer any conclusive enhancement in quality or compression time. Often quality over speed is valued.

Platform compatibility is main concern when disk image types are chosen. Same image type should work on any system, but some formats like CloneCD are limited to PC only.

Package

Second part of the standards usually talks about how to package the material. Allowed package formats today are limited to RAR and ZIP, of which later is used only on 0-day releases.

The sizes of the archives within the distributed file vary from the traditional 3½" floppy disk (1.4 MB) or extended density disk (2.88 MB) to 5 MB, 15 MB (typical for CD images), and even 50 MB files (typical for DVD images). Today, the size of disks are limited by the RAR file extension, which allows 101 files (.RAR + .R00-99). For example, a DVD-R image (4.7 GB), split into 101 pieces, produces approximately 50 MB disks. This principle can be observed with DVD-9 releases, which doubles the 50 MB disk size to 100,000,000 bytes in order to stay under the RAR disk limit. It is also quite common to see RAR files that use the name.part01.rar naming convention.

Different compression levels are used for each material being distributed. Reason for this is that some material compresses much better than others, movies and mp3 files are already compressed with maximum capacity, and repacking them would just create larger file. Ripped movies are still packaged due to the large filesize, but only store compressing is allowed, because modern player programs can play the movies straight from the compressed files, and verifying file integrity during transfer takes more time if the file is compressed with algorithm other than store.

Naming

Rules for naming files and folders are important part of the standards. Correctly named folders make it easier to maintain clean archive and unique filenames allow dupecheck to work properly. There's defined character set which can be used in naming of the folders. Selected allowed character set exists on all platforms in same form. For example foreign characters like ä and ö wouldn't display correctly on all systems, but those can be easily replaced with a and o which are allowed characters.

Allowed characters in defined set:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 . -_

Proper

Proper release is required, when group makes release that violates some part of the standard, or has technical flaw in the material. Sample is usually required to prove the flaw in the material, unless the flaw was clear enough for the release to be nuked at releasing time. Flaw can be found later during testing of the material, such as broken.crack or bad.serial. There's usually two week period after release date during which propers are allowed.