What does "nuked" mean in the peer-to-peer world?

There is a definite jargon in "the Scene", as file sharers / torrent fans call it, and it can definitely be off-putting if you don't spend the time to figure out what it all means. At its most basic, nuking refers to rejecting, deleting or simply recommending people don't download that particular file. There are plenty of reasons for this, but in the video side of things, files are often nuked because they're out of sync (that is, the audio isn't sychronized with the video), are badly cropped (sometimes people zoom in on the video source and end up losing a fair bit of visual material), are incorrectly encoded or use bad codecs (these are more technical issues to do with how large video data files are shrunk down for distribution) or even are just poor quality.

Now, the part that will also doubtless confuse you is the difference between a "cam", a "telesync", a "screener" and a "dvdrip". Well, the last one is probably pretty obvious: it's a copy based on a commercial DVD. A "screener" is interesting, as it's an early DVD release of a commercial movie for reviewers and - sometimes - members of the Motion Pictures Academy (to consider the movie for an Oscar). Screeners usually have scary intro warnings and a video watermark within, something that might say "Property of Dreamworks LLC" or similar in an overt spot on the entire video. Many also drop from color into black and white for 60 seconds every fifteen or twenty minutes. I'm not sure but my theory is that when that happens has some sort of clue about the original source of the screener.

The remaining formats are only subtly different. According to what I can dig up, a "cam" is a regular cheap camcorder someone's smuggled into a theater and surreptitiously used to [illegally, of course] record the movie directly off the screen. A telesync (or "TS") is "a video copy of the movie which was shot in a cinema, often with a professional camera on a tripod in the projection booth, with a direct connection to the sound source." [src]. There's also a "TC", though it's rare: "A telecine machine copies the film digitally from the reels. Sound and picture should be quite good, but due to the equipment involved and cost telecines are fairly uncommon." [src]

In addition, you might see two more common words: PROPER, which refers to a rerelease of a movie with some error or problem (often one that caused the original to be nuked) fixed, and REPACK, which is added when the person or group that released a nuked video have repaired it and re-released it. In other words, when something's nuked, it's only a matter of time before a better version comes along, and when it does, it'll be a REPACK if it's from the same group, or a PROPER if it's from another group.

Since you ask about audio files too, there are a bunch of special tags used to describe mp3 files, including: TV: Audio from television material, Radio: Audio from radio material, VLS: Vinyl Single, LP: Vinyl Full-length Album, CDR: CD-Recordable (CD-R), DVD: Audio from a DVD, TAPE: Music from a tape, Promo: Promotional, XX: Imported, and RETAiL: Retail. [src]

It's confusing and, in most cases, it's illegal, but hopefully you'll have a bit of an idea of what's happening and what all those strange bits of nomenclature mean in The Scene.