IamA YIFY - A former movie uploader and torrent site operator , AMA!

Would you download a car?

Ha! If only I could

I have had and have dozens of YIFY torrents on my computers... I even remember just browsing "YIFY" when I wanted something to watch..

Thanks man... I have lots of money now, but you helped get me through some lean times.

I have since bought many DVDs of movies and shows I only saw because of you!

Perhaps you should sue all the distributors for money since you helped popularize their products?!

Thanks so much for the nice words!

"I have since bought many DVDs of movies and shows I only saw because of you!"

Thank you so much for saying that! My honest opinion is that piracy is actually helpful for the movie industry in terms of profits If someone was unable to download a movie for free on the internet it does not directly translate for a loss of sale in the cinemas or at the DVD shop. However if you introduce to someone (for free) a movie that they really loved, they will go to cinemas when the sequel comes out.

Have you ever been in trouble with law enforcement? Also, did you ever have direct contact with scene groups?

I never had an direct contact with any scene groups. The YIFY name was not really what they stood for. Most private torrent sites banned the use of the name altogether and i wasnt very well loved there :(

Not 'law enforcement' specifically, but as you can imagine the movie industry was not happy with what I was doing.

Maybe they didn't love you, but lots of people watching movies thanks to you surely do :)

Do you think that the scene groups disliked you because it could draw more heat on them, maybe exposing them more than they'd like?

I think they didnt like me because the YIFY movies were shitty quality. And they are right! the movies I uploaded were not even close to the same quality standard as the original 13GB files. (just look at rule number 6 on /r/torrents)

I was always of the mindset that I was filling niche, people with crappy internet and that are happy to watch a movie on their laptop for example.

Did you ever need to get legal advice, take precautions in case something went really bad? Considering what you said about the movie industry (obviously) not being happy with you, it must have been a concern at some point, right?

Like many other internet users (who arent even doing anything wrong) I went out of my way to use false aliases and what not. To put it in perspective, I didnt go nearly as far as using VPNs/Tor and all the jazz. I was really easy to find, hiding underground was never something that I was aiming for.

What was going in mind was more "Oh this is fun and I am learning lots, lets continue this hobby till I get sick of it or till it comes to an end"

What are your sources? Why are you making it for free? Does the job cost you a lot of time?

• The video sources varied throughout the years, the majority were from scene groups (same stuff any joe blogs can find online)

• It was a hobby, it was never intended to make money.

• in the first few years a single movie took ~4 hours to download, ~3 hours to encode and ~1 hour to prep all the meta information and upload to multiple torrent sites. As the years went past I started to automate most of the tasks to easy work load and increase throughput of movies being uploaded

Did you keep the whole YIFY part of your life separate from family and friends? If so, any close moments that compromised that? Also, what made you decide to go into this? Thanks for your great work!

Thanks for the appreciation!

I didnt really go out of my way to keep the YIFY thing a secret in my real life. I loved bragging about it.

All my friends knew, all my family knew. It wasnt really ever a big deal.

When ever I told this to a new friend or a new colleague, I used to love seeing their initial jaw opening reaction. Might make me sound like a bit of a show off, but it was a cool feeling

How do we pronounce your name? Is it like ''WiFi'' or ''Yifee''?

Ha got the question all the time :P I pronounce it as "Yifee", so like yippee but with an F instead.

Should have really included that on our FAQ page on the YTS site at the time

Former?

RIP, sadly the YIFY name came to an end in late 2015. there are a few online articles with more detail about that :)

Why do people tag their files? Doesn't that create a way for law enforcement to find you?

We (the uploaders) tag our files for the fame, for the e-penis.

In reality this wouldnt make any difference for law enforcement to track back which files are originating from which uploader(s)

What made you get into the torrent business?

Hmmm, its just something I started doing.

There was '300mb United' team back in the day and they only uploaded movies to sites like rapidshare and megaupload. I started by taking their movies and uploading to torrents (just another medium really) and people started to download and seed them.

After a little while, I decided why not just encode the movies myself instead of taking them from other groups, thats how the YIFY 'brand' was born really.

Well as a young parent that never has time to go to the movies anymore my family and myself thank you. You're a real world hero.

I assume as a young parent you will have to buy your kid an Ironman toy after seeing the latest iron man movie at home. You too are giving back to the industry :)

Sometimes the site would get the blueray version uploaded a couple of days before the blueray version came out, how is that possible?

Almost in every case there are movie leaks. It might be from the store owners who house the movies pre release date or even someone from the factory who prints the bluray disks.

For the most part, I got the movie sources online after they'd been leaked.

You mentioned that you went online to get leaks before they came out. Yet we all got the movies from you... Where are your sources? Now that this is all done care to share a list of your sources?

I am talking scene groups, like SPARKS, AMIABLE, GEKOS and many more. These group's movies were released to the masses through pirate torrent sites like SceneAccess (for example)

Did I read somewhere you were Kiwi? How did u seed so much on our capped internet?!

I still am a kiwi ;)

What's your educational background like?

Also, I may or may not have gotten all of the Saw movies from you. You are the reason for my being. Thank you.

Like any average kid, I finished highschool and then went on to university for 4 years doing Computer Science and Mathematics.

My grades were average at best! had to redo some papers since I failed them first time. But at the end, I finished my degree, got my certificate and am now working full time in a job that I love

What were your full PC specs?

when I started in 2010 I had: 1.3GHz Celron M laptop with 1GB ram running windows XP :D Yeah it was my life!

I love your work! I used to swear by YIFY torrents because I had crap internet and they were always reliable for what I needed. Did you ever see what you were doing as "criminal" and were you ever actually concerned what may happen to you as a result of this hobby?

I never really saw this as a criminal thing to be honest.

It all started just as a 'for fun' thing, I never really thought anything of the ordeal when I started uploading in 2010. I essentially just went along for the ride as the YIFY name grew.

I guess what I am trying to say is, I wasnt smart enough to think ahead of what could the consequences be in the future. To my luck everything ended up being smooth and ok :)

Thanks for all your work over the years.

What's your thoughts on what happened last winter. Do you know the folks who are now running the service? Was it a 'takeover' as it was reported to be? Was it the same people behind the EZTV changeover?

There was no formal nor any official take over. The YTS site was taken offline and I guess these people saw the chance and took it. I was a little angry about what happened that someone is happy to lie and trick users into thinking its was all planned move, but I guess that is life and was some what expected.

As far as I can tell it was the same people who did the hostile takeover on the EZTV sites too

Dude or dudette you're a legend! Do you ever hang out with aXXo or FXG?

Aww thanks!

haha I wish! having a beer with those would be amazing!

First off, I'm a huge fan of your work--I feel like your absence has left a huge hole in a land where credibility and reliability is king. When was the "oh shit" moment where you realized that people/downloaders really took a notice of your name and work?*

Edit: *That is if you had one at all, I assume you did.

that a really tough question. I think it was when I hit 50,000 likes on the facebook page.

This was before there was even a concept of the YIFY-Torrents/YTS website and I was only uploading to public torrent sites. It was hard to see a 'user base' number as the best you could see the seed/peers counts. When reached 50k likes on the facebook group I think it hit me that people really do follow the 'YIFY' name.

Do you think if more production companies moved their shows over to streaming services like Netflix's who stream their own shows/movies or having the movie hosted on YouTube with ads would it kill off pirating?

For sure! Look at the music industry and spoitfy for example. Can you imagine yourself going to a torrent site and downloading a song you want to listen to? thats a ridiculous concept in 2016.

What spottily has done for the music industry is exactly what we need more of for the film industry. Netflix is definitely getting there, but with the geo blocks its still a big hindrance to see some very popular TV series.

Just my 2 cents

Why did you quit? You were the best one out there! Any recommended movies and uploaders?

One could say I was forced to quit: Here is an article by TorrentFreak that should shed more light: https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-we-shut-down-ytsyify-and-popcorn-time-151103/

To be totally honest with, I dont know any uploaders. I never even watched my own encoded movies. No body got time for that :P

Thank you for years of hard work!

What and when was the last dvd you paid for?

I go to the cinemas with my friends once a week for the past year or so. Paying $17 NZD per ticket. No regrets :D

What internet provider did you use? I was so surprised to find YIFY was an Aucklander like me. I wouldn't have thought the internet was fast enough here

Yeah, so you have to keep in mind that all the encoding work and uploading and seedin had to be done on remote servers. There is no way it could have been hosted here in NZ, even with the new UFB rollout, its not realistic to be uploading terabytes of data monthly here

So I'm a bit of an audiophile, and I always want to get the best sound out of anything I'm watching/listening to. It always kind of annoyed me that your files had high video resolution, but were encoded with a really low (relatively speaking) audio threshold. It constantly frustrated me that I was having to jack up the volume artificially when I already had my speakers on the highest setting, and lose audio quality. Is there a specific reason that you encoded your movies with a lower audio quality? Or was it a byproduct of the digitization process or something?

I'm not trying to sound ungrateful (Even though it probably comes off that way... sorry...), probably half my movies are from you. I'm genuinely curious as to why your audio quality was seemingly a lot worse than other guys' torrents.

No need to apologies, I totally understand your point of view.

In my opinion the audio matches the video quality. We are talking ~800Kbit/s video bitrate coupled with ~96Kbit audio on 2CH. The original thing that made YIFY different from other uploads on torrent sites was the small file size. Nothing else.

Sure later on that grew into having a nice layout on the webiste an amazing amount of trust from the user base, but I was not wanting to change the original premise of what made YIFY popular.

Even though I totally agree that 5.1 and high audio bit rate would have been a great move and most if not all users would have liked it, It was simply too late to make a change. As soon as I would have uploaded one 5.1CH movie there will be an automatic expectation to re encode and re upload all the movie collection on the website. That would have been an impossible task for me to do.

If I were to start fresh, I would do 5.1 or sure on all the uploads.

What's your favorite movie?

The Chronicles of Riddick!

Favorite of all time for sure

Have you shared any of the workflow, automation tools or encoding settings you used?

Before everything was automatic, I used to look out for people who can help with the encoding and uploading. If memory serves me right, there were a total of about 8 off helpers throughout 2012 who helped out with the encoding. For those people I wrote up a detailed tutorial of how to go about with the encoding.

I didnt really go out of my way making a public tutorial because I never thought it was relevant, anyone could technically go and use mediainfo to see the encoding settings which were used

Are you thinking of starting up again under a different alias?

haha, no way! even though I have learnt so much and could probably do it all over again, and better, I dont have the passion for this anymore.

The passion I had at the time for the website, for the users, for the uploading is a massive reason and driver that YIFY/YTS was a success.

How come the law doesn't do anything about torrent sites?

Every country has different laws, and the internet is a very weird place when talking about whats legalities or even morality.

Technically speaking, a torrent site doesnt actually host anything illegal nor anything infringing. It simply has some cover arts and text data (same things you can find on IMDB for example) When you download a torrent you download the infringing from other users, not the websites.

With that being said, people's next argument is usually "Lets make torrent sites illegal for aiding piracy", but when you really think about this, it could be a massive slippery slope. If you ban a torrent site for aiding the infringement of content, on the same premise you should make google illegal too, and why stop there, you could make the the whole internet illegal since its used to aid piracy.

Its a very complex and delicate ongoing issue

Hey man I really hope you see this. Thanks for the entertainment over the years!

Mt Wellington NZ represent. I run the FB page for a local burger place and said at one point after the news came out "I bet he's been here, I'd like to shout that man a burger" much positive debate ensued around this.

Have you? The offer is still open!

http://www.bigjs.co.nz/

Edit: Messed up some engrish

DAAAAMMMNNNN You guys, legit, make the absolute best burgers. EVER!!!!

http://i.imgur.com/j2XWs6r.jpg

What you think is gonna happen in the future with torrent movie pirate sites and all the piracy industry behind movies? i mean, you see a future with no longer more pirate sites and all this content provided by sites like youtube and spotify (in a legal way)

Pirate sites will always be around in some form. As long as there is internet there will be piracy. The idea and the goal is to not give any reason for an average consume the need or want to go out of their way to pirate a film.

Now in my opinion this is happening very well with spotify for example. As one of my previous comments said, Netflix is also on the right path but there are still so many limitations like timing and locations

Did you ever speak with production company's and were they pissed?

Sadly I never got the chance to talk to them directly. I would have loved to ,if I had been given the chance, just to get their honest view on the matters around piracy

what do you think the future of torrent is? Do you think someone else will take your place as the undisputed champ of content? Secondly, what are your thoughts on the movie industry?

the torrent protocol will not die anytime soon, its proven itself time and time again to be an amazing means to share data in a distributed way.

I am more than sure that some other upload will (or already has?) took the place in providing consistent movies on torrent websites. Its inevitable to happen at some point.

My thoughts on the movie industry in regards to piracy? They are doing what they think is right, I totally understand their prospective of seeing the losses they have due to piracy, but I think they need to understand that piracy is not a battle nor a war. Its a fact, and it will continue to happen. You can not beat it. What they can do, is make their services good enough that piracy will be less relevant. Thats how they will win

I just searched my archive for 'YIFY'... 1465/2105 are tagged as yours. Thanks for your work, dude.

I have two questions:

1. Did you at some point begin to accept third party encodes for release under your 'brand'?
   
2. What encoder tool did you use: StaxRip, Handbrake, or something else?
   

Also, I agree: Chronicles of Riddick FTW!

Damn you sure are a collector! :D

I have had a small 'team' early on in 2012 where we movies we encoded (using same tools and settings always) This was short lived since the people helping lost interested mostly. I never accepted encodes from randoms, and many kind users did offer their help

At the start Was suing MeGUI as the UI for x264 encoder along side the nero aac audio encoder.

However towards the end when I had thing automated, everything was running in the command line, so using x264, mkvtools, MP4Box, nero audio tools, some audio normilizers (cant remeber the name though)

Do you live in a country with relaxed piracy laws? Id be paranoid out of my mind if I were to have done what you have!

New Zealand, a country part of the commonwealth. I would imagine that piracy laws are no different here than what they are like in other Commonwealth nations.

I dont think I was ever too paranoid, I always had told myself "When someone asks you to stop properly, you stop". Its just no one really asked me to stop until late last year is all.

I was never planning to put a fight when that time comes. That might sound cowardly, but keep in mind, this was my hobby, nothing more nothing less :)

Feel like I'm talking to a legend here. Godspeed, my friend.

How exactly did that fateful conversation with the MPAA go? I imagine since you are in NZ there wasn't too much they could actually do, but I would think that they would try to be a little harder on one of the most prolific international releasers. Was it an "oh shit" moment or more of an "about time"? Was it basically a cease and desist or did you have to go totally dark and cover your tracks?

Just wondering what they realistically could've done to you and how you felt when the hammer came down. I imagine the e-peen goes kind of limp when something like that happens; your name was synonymous with pirated movies for so many years

Btw... thanks

Love the question! It was defiantly a more of 'about time' kind of thing, as some of my other answers stated, I was never trying to actually hide or be underground with this past time of mine.

The process was scary, I'd be lying if I said it wasnt. but looking back now, I got so much out of it, I know so much more and got to experience something pretty unique. (also a cool story for the camp fire)

Hey mate, awesome to hear from you again, I was an active member of YIFY since 2012 and was a VIP member always in the chat room which sadly disappeared when uploaders changed. Had a few good chats with you back in the days, last i remember you were studying at Uni, Hows life been treating ya buddy?

Heya, I suspect your name on reddit is not the same it was on the Site (otherwise I would probably recognize it) Did you know that there were only ~150 users who had the VIP status? You can imagine out of how many total :)

Life is going great :D

Now that you have moved out of the scene; 1. What are the new hobbies you are working on? 2. Who are the people you look up to now? (Do not know how that is related but it felt like the right question ;))

As you expect once one project dies I had to start on another. Currently I am working on a little tool that helps visualize the structure and connectivity of the internet and how ISPs are connected to each other. Real nerdy stuff ha.

I dont have one specific person I look up to right now. I guess the best thing I can say is that I look up to my colleagues at work. They are the smartest people I know when we talk about technical computer things.

The rumour was you were a kiwi at Uni right? I heard about you or someone claiming to be you wearing a YIFY shirt around.

I loved that Shirt! Was probably me and or my friends.

What was the last film you uploaded? And did you know it was the last one at the time?

Loved your work, bro.

https://thepiratebay.se/user/YIFY

Seems it was insideout 3D. No I had no idea that it would be the last film that will come out of the YIFY account

Thanks for doing this and all the movie encoding!
Are you worried that the movie industry will come after you, now or in the future?

They already have hence the website is offline and I am the 'former' YIFY :) I am not worried about the future, as I have no intention of getting back into this ecosystem again. With that said, I will never forget the past 5 years of being involved in uploading movies and managing a torrent site

Thanks for coming by YIFY. I got a lot of Reddit hate for requesting this AMA. I've downloaded a lot of your titles. If you could, please answer the 5 questions I asked in my AMA request.

1. What is the motivation behind uploading so many torrents?
2. How large is your team?
3. How organized are you?
4. Is there money to be made uploading torrents?
5. How do you protect yourself from lawsuits and the government?

Heya

Ill keep it short and sweet as I answered most of these in other places :)

1) Mostly, for the fun of it I guess. 2) There was help through out the early days, maybe total of 10 odd amazing people at the start 3) I am the messiest person in the world! my room needs a mad clean-out 4) Hmm the only money you could get is via ad providers. And they are the scum of the internet. We are talking 'The facebook of sex' ads 5) I didnt :P

In some parts of world, YIFY name stands for stability, durability and quality, it's in the domain of brand names like Sony, Microsoft, Razor1911, you know what your getting when there is YIFY label.

Me and all of my friends would not dare to download any other encoder, we would wait for YIFY label to show up.
Thank you for the years of quality seeds and joy you have brought to me and my friends and family.

As for the question, do you plan on doing >3.3gb non 3d videos encoding?

Recently, I have changed display settings to 40 inch monitor, and most of YIFY HD videos will not display properly, I must look for other encoders, which I don't like. (rarbg doing good work for now)

Regards dear, thank you for everything

edit: there was some picture of YIFY team (20+ guys standing) circulating the web, is it real?

To answer your question, well I dont really plan on uploading anything anymore, out of the game.

Now to my question: where do I find this picture of the 20 man YIFY team???? I would love to see this! haha

Is it true you went to Waikato University? I may have done comp-sci with you.

Graduated 2014 Small world :D

Do you work alone? Who is BOKUTOX, another alias of yours or a friend working with you? (Pardon my ignorance if it's already been answered)

No no, Bokutox was one of the longest standing encoding help back in 2012. He was doing an amazing job for a good few months too. Upload a bunch of films under the 'YIFY' brand (you would have seen his name on the 'encoded by' tag on our old website at the time)

How much bandwidth do you/did you use monthly? Does your isp hate you? Ever get a cease and desist letter from them?

Funnily enough, not much, we are talking maybe 200-300GB per month on average.

Keep in mind that very early on I was using a seedbox for the distribution of the movies, uploading on NZ 1mbit/s upload internet is hell (syaing this out of experience)

Did u know Otto or any of the other encoders in real life?

Funny story,

OTTO was never a real person, he was the encoding/uploading bot. The reason he was called him auto was from the word "Automatic" -> "Auto" -> "OTTO"

OTTO was a collection of scripts written primarily in bash that got a new movie, did a bunch of calculations, encoded it, took screenshots, got movie cover, collected meta data (title, year, cast, synopsys and more) and uploaded to YTS and some other public torrent websites.

Needless to say OTTO was able to upload 3-10 movies per day (depending how many sources it could find that matched a certain criteria)

In regards to the other encoders, no I never got to meet them in real life. They were from all parts of the world.

Do you think coffee is better in Wellington rather than Auckland?

Ow, I hate coffee! give me a hot chocolate !!!!

Your website (if it was yours anyway; I never bothered to confirm. yts.re iirc) provided many hours of entertainment for my then dying uncle. Thank you so much for making his last days more bearable for him.

With our shit internet, we would start download for 720p in the afternoon, and come night we could watch two movies. Thank you.

I don't have a question? Just good luck with whatever you're doing now man.

Thank you so much for this! I dont have more words to say, Thank you

You realize this is a whole lot of evidence all complied in one place, no?

Oh Shit, you are right, I am out!

Peace.

If you could do it all over again, would you change anything? And how did evolving technology affect the quality and speed of your work?

I'm such a huge fan of you guys! You could say that pirating is what gave me the interest to go into compSci myself. We didn't have the money to buy games or movies and often we would appreciate how cool and useful it was to pirate. Sometimes cracking games was more fun than the game itself! XD I'm happy you're able to move on. Quite while you're ahead right? This way you're going to remembered by the public as one of the greats.

Thank you so much for the support and the kind words!!!

Really happy to see that tinkering with cracks and games from is what got you into this IT industry. Its awesome!

Hmm, would I change anything? short answer is, no. I wouldnt. When I got started I knew nothing about programming, I was in my first year of university and I picked compsci because its what my friends were doing. Having the website and having to learn the hard way how to code, how to fix bugs, how to scale up with extra traffic, how to add redundancy due to the website falling over the weekend previous. It was an amazing experience. Having to put in place an automatic bot that encodes and uploads and seeds movies all by itself, only because I didnt have the time to do it manually. I wouldnt trade it for the world!

Why do you label movies as 1080p when they're worse than HD and sometimes upscaled from a DVD source?

They were labeled 1080p because they were 1920*1080 resolution (ignoring changing aspect ratios) That is what resolution is. I totally agree that they did not come close to the same visual quality of the ~13GB files, however the niche I was uploading for were the people who watched the movies on their laptop in bed or some crappy old computer monitor, or even simply people who couldn't afford to download over 10GB for a single movie.

I hope that kind of explains the view that if you think the video quality is super crappy and 'unwatchable' then the YIFY upload are probably simply not for you. Simply catering for a niche :)

hello , YIFY , you were the brand name in my household when anybody wanted to watch a movie , you were the primary source when personally i wanted to watch a movie , i would wait for the YIFY tag to show up . i read below that you are into 'networking' , is that maybe why torrenting started for you ? Thanks alot man and cheers . Good luck

Cheers for the cool comment!

To answer your question, I think it was actually the reverse, I am into programming and networking because of the torrent site, it the place I had to learn how to go about optimizing servers and doing other 1337 h4xor things :P

I really am thankful for the website and the YIFY part of my life as, to some extent, it made me who I am (not trying to sounds cheesy)