News written by Petteri Pyyny (October, 2019)

In our article series, we're digging into AfterDawn's news archive and looking what happened exactly 20 years ago. This article series also celebrates AfterDawn's 20th anniversary.

So, we're digging into our news archive and trying to figure out what was hot and what was not, back in October, 1999 when our site was only four months old. I'd like to remind you, our readers, that back then, AfterDawn was strictly focused on digital audio and video technologies and reporting events in those genres. More generic "all about tech" arrived to our site much later.

Our first ever stories about cell phones

As said, our focus back then, was strictly with digital audio and video. But the October, 1999 marks the first time in our history that cell phones were mentioned in our news. Looking at our (and everybody else's) news coverage nowadays and it seems that smartphones and related technologies are the thing that nowadays makes the headlines. Things have changed, truly.

Well, anyway, back in October, 1999 we published a press release from a Finnish mobile phone manufacturer. No, not Nokia. But another one, called Benefon. Company had just launched the first-ever GSM phone that had a built-in GPS navigation in it. Pretty revolutionary 20 years ago. It actually took several years until GPS navigation became a commonplace with phones.

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Exactly 50 years ago today, on 29th of October, 1969, the first message was sent over something that we nowadays recognize as the Internet. Basically, today marks the date when the first ever message was successfully (more about that later..) was over a long distance computer network.

On 29th of October, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, a graduate student at the UCLA, tried to send a message to Stanforrd University, to Charley Kline ja Bill Duvall.

Kleinrock tried to send a simple word from UCLA to Stanford: LOGIN.

But as these things go, the terminals crashed before the entire message was sent out.

So, the first message ever sent over the Internet was simply LO.

The team managed to sent the entire LOGIN word about an hour later, but history nowadays remembers mostly the "LO".

After that message, the development of the Internet's predecessor, ARPANET, started taking shape over the upcoming decades, finally, in 1990s, transforming into a mainstream medium that we know as the modern Internet. Nowadays, 29th of October is widely celebrated as the Internet Day.

The term WEB-DL relates to online piracy of movies and TV shows. It indicates the original source of the pirated movie or a TV show.

WEB-DL simply means that the pirated material in distribution was originally copied from a web download source, such as from Netflix, Hulu or similar service. As such services use various video resolutions and bitrates, the term itself doesn't tell how good or bad the quality of the pirated video is.

The WEB-DL file has been typically "ripped" or copied from a online streaming service, either by capturing the video file from stream or by copying the offline download of the video, removing its copy protections. As the source material is in a digital format, the original quality is deemed good, depending of the web download resolution and bitrate.

As mentioned, the term WEB-DL itself doesn't indicate what resolution the file is in, so the term is typically associated with another acronym, telling its video resolution. Such terms include 720p and 1080p (=FullHD).

Pirated video files in WEB-DL format are distributed either in their original file format or converted to another file format, depending on person who originally copied the material and his/her preferences for the file. If the video is distributed as-is, in the same format as it was streamed or downloaded, the resulting, distributed file is lossless (compared to the original stream/download), meaning that its quality is 1:1 to the originally downloaded file.

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The term HDRip is often used in online video (TV shows, movies) piracy. The term indicates the source of the pirated TV show or a movie.

Term HDRip is used to describe video that has been "ripped" from a HDTV broadcast, by one mean or another. As HDTV broadcasts vary with the used resolution, the term itself doesn't necessarily indicate what resolution the ripped video is in.

"Ripping" process itself means simply a way to copy the material, digitally. In HDRip's case, the "ripping" has been done either by a digital capture card, recording the broadcasted TV show or by, for example, copying the material from a DVR device that has stored it without copyright protection flags. This also means that a digital source has been the source material for the video, meaning that the original material is pretty good / near perfect.

HDRips, however, can be either distributed as-is (in the very same bitrate and resolution as they were ripped in) or by compressing them to another format or smaller resolution. Thus, often, the term HDRip is paired with a term indicating the resolution the video is in, like 720p or

1080p.

You should also check these commonly used acronyms for pirated video material:

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