(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta

Snaller writes "See the latest movies on the net? Its possible - apparently the law in Taiwan says that for a movie to be protected by copyright law one has to apply for such protection within a month after the opening in the theaters. This rarely happens and as a consequence movie88 has opened a virtual movieplex: See any of their films for 1 dollar. The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive, but for that 1 dollar you can view it anytime and as much as you like for 3 days. The selection includes movies like "Shrek", "Legally Blonde","American Pie 2","Gone with the wind", James Bond and Batman." Yeah this'll last. Right. But it really demonstrates what TV will be like in the future when you have access to thousands of movies. And the buck a film rate strikes me as awesome. I'd watch a lot more movies if they were only a buck.

Comments

O well

[Compunerd]

I guess this is fine - yes - but what about the quality? I work in a company doing video-on-demand (VoD), and VoD in less quality than 2Mbps MPEG-4 isn't a good thing.

And ... I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked :-)

roy

Re:O well

[kimihia]

For those interested in the dirty details, may I recommend:

• wget
• asfrecorder
• Squid
• Ethereal (+ tcpdump)
• A plugin-equipped browser (eg, Mozilla)

With that combination (and sometimes "strings") I can download ANY Quicktime or Windows Media video that I want to - permissions be damned. Plus, get this: mplayer on Linux does a better job of playing Windows Media files than Windows Media Player on Windows! (And at a higher screen res too!)

BTW, the secret letter is 'm'. (This may become apparant if you have done the above.) I don't have time for a complete downloading HOWTO, but ... mov = wget, asf = wget, asx = asfrecorder, wmv = try asfrecorder then wget.

slashdotted?

[mjh]

Maybe it's just my connection, but I can't seem to get to this site very well. If it can't suvive the /. effect, exactly how are they going to succesfully stream video ?

Re:slashdotted?

[m_evanchik]

I have the same experience. The web site is slow but the streaming video is maxing out my broadband at 1050 Kbs.

This is pretty interesting. I guess they did a good job scaling their video servers but not a good job on the web server. Kudos to them for devoting the most resources to the most important application.

Balls

[corby]

These guys definitely have gonads. Not only are they throwing a big "up yours" to the MPAA. but they are also charging for access to hit TV shows like "Friends."

Some of their pricing decisions seem a bit arbitrary, however. For example, you can view the 3h17m movie Magnolia for the price of a single download, but the similarly long Schindler's list is broken up into three streams that must be viewed separately.

I give them five days before the US government threatens to give China the green light to annex unless the Taiwanese government cracks down on this site.

Movies for less than US$1

[grainofsand]

For what it's worth, one of the sole benefits of living on the Chinese mainland is DVD's for 7 Chinese yuan (US$0.84)! Sold at foreigner-friendly restaurants - you get to flick through a huge selection of DVDs (little prOn though) and settle the bill for food and movies together. New releases are available about 2-3 weeks before debut screening in the US.