R5 relates to a Region 5 DVD format created by the movie industry to help combat pirates, as well as tags used by movie pirates for distribution on the Internet. The movie industry created this format in efforts to help prevent piracy by producing higher quality Telecine transferred movies than pirates can offer on the Internet. This higher quality is achieved by the use of professional grade film transfer devices as opposed to lesser quality equipment obtainable by movie pirates. Groups releasing movies in this format can be identified with a tag resembling Moviename.R5.encodeformat.group.
R5 feeds in the form of pirated copies, have little to no remastering done to clean up the quality and usually never contain any special features. What this format allows potential bootleggers to do is release a DVD copy of a movie right around the time when a Screener is available on the Internet. Additionally, if an R5 DVD is released without an English audio Track, the direct line audio from the original film can be inserted and often tagged with .LINE in the finished filename.
There is currently no standard in the bootleg scene as to how R5 movies are labelled, therefore often files may be tagged as something familiar so as not to sway peers from downloading a specific group's offering. Names such as Telecines, DVD Screeners, or even DVD rips can be seen in place of the R5 tag that should be used on movies in this format. Several release groups have started using the R5 or R5 line tags to distinguish these files and urge other release groups to do the same to gain some standardization in the scene.
R5
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