If I Download a Movie What is R5 Format

If you have ever downloaded a movie from the internet and you see the letters R5 in the filename you can be assured of a very good image quality. The movie quality will generally be the same as that of a DVD screener, but it will not have the scrolling text and mono-cut scenes that are found in screener releases.

DVD Region 5 was the former Soviet Union - hence the name R5 - short for , you guessed it Region 5. This region is still the place where many of todays hot releases such as Grown Ups, Toy Story 3 and the Expendables originate and are quickly distributed around the Internet. Any title with R5 in it will be almost as good quality as a shop based release in terms of image and sound.

R5 movies differ from commercial releases that you might buy in stores in that they are usually a direct Telecine transfer of the film without any image processing and without any special features. This allows the film to be released for sale at the same time that DVD Screeners are released.

Since DVD Screeners are the chief source of high-quality pre-DVD release movies, this allows the movie studios to beat the pirates to market. In some cases, movies are obtained from non-english speaking countries, and therefore are released with a foreign sound track, meaning that the audio has to be replaced before distribution. This can often lead to lower quality audio tracks than with commercial DVD's for example, but in this case the R5 would be tagged with ".LINE" to distinguish it from a release with a DVD audio track.