Pirated movie release types such as BDRip, DVDRip, TC, R5, Screener, TS and CAM allows downloaders to easily identify what type of quality you would be expecting. For example, if you download a CAM release, you are going to expect a really bad quality because it is a copy made in a cinema using a camcorder, possibly mounted on a tripod and the sound source is the camera microphone. Even though there is supposed to be a standard where the movie rippers should follow, there are some that doesn’t care and release a bad quality movie with a DVDRip title to the filename.
Downloaders will surely be pissed because they have spent hours downloading the so called DVDRip but gotten a lousy quality instead. One way to make sure that it doesn’t happen to you is by manually previewing the videos without finishing the download. All you need is a Firefox web browser, 7-Zip file archiver and a media player that can play incomplete or corrupted videos such as VLC.
It’s actually pretty straight forward as long as you have the correct software that I mentioned above. Normally a full movie would consist of a few parts because of the file hosting size limitation. You MUST download the first part because if you start with the later parts, the media player cannot decide what codec to use to play the video file.
Allow the download of the first part to reach at least 5MB and then click the Pause icon at the Firefox download manager to pause the download. Go to the location where the file is saved (by default it is in a folder called Download in My Documents), right click on the .part file, go to 7-Zip and select Extract Here.
If the video file is passworded, enter the password which is usually found on the site where you got the links from. Ignore the CRC failed in encrypted file wrong password error in 7-Zip. Click the Close button.
Simply play the extracted AVI file with VLC media player, GOM player or KMPlayer and you get a short preview of the video that you wanted to download. Do not use Windows Media Player because it does not support playing incomplete video file and gives you the error popup saying “Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file.”
The above tip is more suitable for advanced users that doesn’t like to install unnecessary software on their computer. The reason why I’ve chosen Firefox, VLC and 7-Zip is because all 3 of them have portable versions which can be downloaded on PortableApps.com and I can run it without installing it on my computer. This method also works on any other file hosting websites. There are automated ways of previewing videos using third party software which I will share with you tomorrow.
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