How to Check the Quality of a Movie Before Downloading
What is a Movie Quality Ranking?
Movie Quality Ranking is the process of rating and ranking a movie based on its quality. We would start with the literal quality of the movie downloads. We would then work through the various formats in reverse order, starting the worst quality and ending with the highest.
Depending on the site that you use, this information can pop up in a few different places. It might be in the file name, in an adjacent information box, or in the NFO file. Remember, you can often download the NFO file without downloading the whole movie if you cannot find the information anywhere else.
Workprint
A workprint is a pre-release version of a movie. It’s likened to as the first draft in writing terms it is not a finished product. You might find pre-dubbed sound, placeholders, missing special effects, and other issues in it.
Cam
Cam quality refers to a copy of a movie that someone has developed by filming the screen in a movie theater while using a recording device. The copies are normally illegal and they all suffer from low quality.
Telesync
Like cam quality, telesync movies have also been illegally recorded in the movie theater itself. However, unlike cam quality, people make use of professional recording equipment to make the recording. Usually, the recording takes place in the projection booth.
DVDscr
DVDscr is the short term for DVD Screener. It is a copy of a DVD that the studio has sent out for promotional purposes. Because its is a copy of a promotional DVD, it will not hold the usual DVD extras such as the director’s cuts and additional scenes. It might also contain serial numbers, counters, and other information on the screen.
DVD
Now we are moving onto the best movie quality rankings. DVD copies come in two forms, DVD-Rip and DVD-R.
A DVD-Rip is a final retail version of a movie, but it will not have all the extras that you typically get on a DVD. DVD-R versions are copies of entire DVDs; you will get the extras. As a consequence of the extra material, DVD-R versions of films are often 5GB or more in size.
WEB-DL
WEB-DL copies of movies have been ripped directly from a streaming service or downloaded from an online digital store like iTunes or Amazon.
To check the quality of a WEB-DL movie before downloading it, pay attention to the accompanying resolution information. There are four common WEB-DL resolutions: 480p, 720p, 1080p, and 2160p. 480p and 720p are the most common.
Blu-ray
As the name suggests, Blu-ray quality movies have been created from Blu-ray discs. Once again, you will come across several different resolutions. They are 480p, 576p, 720p, 1080p, and 2160p. Blu-ray movies in 480p, 576p, and 720p have been manually encoded to a lower resolution than the original source in order to make the file size smaller.
Where to Check Movie Ratings
We now move onto the critical quality of movies. And in the world of movie ratings, there are three big sites worth checking: Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDb.
1. Metacritic
Metacritic gives each movie a score out of 100 based on an aggregate of scores from dozens of other reviewers, sites, newspapers, and blogs. For each aggregated score, there’s a link to the original review so you can read it in full. The scores are also categorized into positive, mixed, and negative. It gives you an easy way to tell whether a couple of outliers have influenced the overall average.
Separate from the critic reviews, Metacritic also has user reviews. When you click on a movie, you can give a score of 1-10 with a single click. Like the critic’s reviews, you can see an average of all user scores.
2. Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes uses its “Tomatometer” to let you know whether a movie is worth watching. When at least 60 percent of reviews are positive, a movie would get a red tomato and is considered “Fresh”. If the score of the movie below 60 percent, it gets a green splat and a “Rotten” rating.
The highest accolade is “Certified Fresh”. A movie gets that top rating when it scores above 75 percent and has at least five reviews from “Top Critics”.
As on Metacritic, audience scores and reviews are also available.
3. IMDb
Lastly, you should check out IMDb. The scores on IMDb are entirely user-generated; every film has a rating out of 10. All you need to do to add your own rating is register on the site.
IMDb typically has the most audience reviews from the three sites, so you can be more confident that the average score you’re seeing is representative of the movie’s true quality.
More Movie Metadata to Check
Making sure you have a high-quality movie is only half of the battle. There are lots of other bits of movie metadata you also need to keep an eye on if you want to make sure you download the best version of the video for your needs:
1. Date
2. Languages
3. Subtitles
4. Genres
5. JPG
6. NFO
