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Movielink.com: Nice But Not Ready For Prime Time
We had just a couple of references here on Movielink.com and some comments but no reviews. Well, I have tried it and here are my thoughts on it.
For those not familiar with that, they call themselves an "IP based movie rental service". You basically rent movies by downloading them to your PC (as of now, only WindowsMedia or RealPlayer formats) for watching at a convenient time.
The media files have about 512Mb which in my case (AT&T cable modem) takes about 50min to download. You register using your credit card and they don't ask for too much information there.
The price varies with an average of $3 and the selection is OK, not great. You can see some titles that have been just released for PPV channels. There's no search function, so you have to browse using their categories (action, comedy, blah, blah). In some cases you can see a small trailer for the movie.
They have their own download manager that looks a little bit like those p2p programs. You can see the progress of the download and can launch the player at the end. You have a period of 30 days to watch the movie BUT, only 24 hours to watch it once you hit "play". Of course you can pause or watch it again but only within the 24-hour period after the first play. I think they should give you at least 5 days for that.
The quality is OK, not great but quite alright to watch something for fun. I think it's something around SVCD. My greatest complain is that they only have full screen versions of the movies. No widescreen.
Once you download the movie you have to be connected to start playing it. That's because you have to "authenticate" yourself. So, another bummer. You can't download something to watch on a flight for example. Well, I guess you may be able to start playing at home and then stop it and start again on the plane, but I didn't try that. That would be one advantage over a DVD since you wouldn't be using the DVD-drive thus saving some battery time.
I had problems playing the first movie and had to call support. They gave me a code to rent the movie again but after 3 tries they though there was something wrong with the movie! Bingo, other customer had the same complain. Then I decided to try another movie and had to call support again, which by the way was quite knowledgeable and attentive. I could not download the movie. Here's where I decided I would not use the service again: they recommend that I disabled my firewall (ZoneAlarm) to download it! Even after I did that, it didn't work. The problem seemed to be that I was on my home network on a LinkSys router. They asked me to bypass the router, hook the computer to the cable modem directly and it worked! Here's my complain: I never had to do that for anything, from my company's VPN to my other download services. So if I have to tweak my network/router just to use their service, they've lost a customer. Well, maybe that was just me!
I really liked the idea of being able to download a movie and watch it on my PC, without having to wait for it to come in the mail (NetFlix) or drive to my local video store twice (to pick up and to drop off). I watch the DVDs on my computer anyway, so it doesn't bother me that I don't use a big screen.
But they need to at least work on that download issue and enhance their website (at least include a search button) before I could use their services on a regular basis.
Hope this is helpful to you folks!
Slashdot welcomes reader features and reviews -- thanks to Ismenio for this one.
Doesn't do me much good if I can't use it, eh?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Like the xbox perhaps - built-in HD & DVD, 5.1 digital audio, Component/SVideo/Composite video?
Once you download the movie you have to be connected to start playing it. That's because you have to "authenticate" yourself.
So, when the service goes away and there's no one out there to do the authenication, then what? And, if the file you downloaded and paid for is corrupt, do you get your money back or are you told, "Oh, gee, that's a bummer, sorry"? Do you pay once for unlimited views, or is this a one time view per download? If you only get to watch it once per pay, do they let you just pay again or force you to download all over again?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Sure, it's a pain that you have to tweak things for software to work, but you really need to know what you're getting into with things like routers and firewalls -- with security comes the loss of features.
Instead of connecting the modem directly to your PC, you can set your router to have your PC as a DMZ (De-Militarized Zone) host. Basically, this forwards all ports to your computer. Once you have a connection, you can take a look at what ports are being used, and forward just those. The problem is that some software, such as ICQ, use random ports for connecting.
In ten years, this is pretty much the way people will be 'renting' movies, either through a computer or a set-top box that acts like a computer.
Movielink.com doesn't have it quite right yet. Neither does shaw.ca (cable provider) which is starting to do the same thing over your digital-cable box. They have problems with limited selection and play time. Can't say anything about the technical side, as there hasn't been anything I've wanted to see to bother trying. Price is not an issue, they are trying to get people to try it by charging only C$2.00, a real deal when rentals are in the C$5.00 range.
What is needed is selection comparible to a video store, with a reasonable view time (at least 48 hours for new releases, and 7 days for old stuff to mimic the video stores). Quality has to at least equal VHS. As long as the price is competitive, going to the video store is going to become a thing of the past for all but the completely unconnected.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Let me guess. You added the original AC3 soundtrack
to the DivX?
Is it REALLY necessary to go beyond the size of
an 800 Meg CD-R ?
--- Eat my sig.
Unfortunately this is going to fail and paint a bad mark on the future of this idea. I would much rather go to one of the 3 video stores in walking distance of my house and rent the DVD to watch on my 5.1 surround sound system then pay $1 less to wait an hour to download a poor quality version to watch on my computer. This would be cool in a rural backwoods area, but then you most likely will have only a few (if any)expensive broadband options, making it likely that you wont have high speed access anyway. In 2 or 3 years this will probably pan out, but now it's just premature.
Sound waves should be free!
> There is no such thing as a protected file format
> or a movie that can only play once. If you can
> play it, you can use a screen capture program to
> capture the video.
Not entirely true for high resolution. Your AGP port simply won't allow to capture the video in realtime.
An AGP benchmarking utility for read performance is available somewhere on the site www.seriousmagic.com
The easiest way to capture the video would be to route the video-out of your graphics board into a capture card. That's an analog solution, but it works.
--- Eat my sig.
Well the license I received for my Real Video clip was indeed valid for 24 hours only.
So even if you bypassed their auto-deletion mechanism, you can still watch the clip only within 24 hours.
So I'd say it is a reasonably secure solution. However one profound DRM hack can make the system obsolete pretty quickly -- that is until Microsoft or real counter with a mandatory client upgrade several weeks later.
--- Eat my sig.
From this review (and others that have been floating around), IP rental just won't work in it's present state. My guess is there are those who will try it for its novelty value (such as the reviewer, and for that matter, my self), but they need to improve/change several things before it will ever take off.
1. Quality, quality, quality. DIVX is good, but by no means near DVD (or even a good quality VHS). From what I understand, this uses a lower quality compression then DIVX.
2. Co-branding with service providers. As it stands, the movies are delivered to from a remote IP address and the actual transfer of data runs over your pre-existing ISP. With more and more ISPs trying to cap large data transfers, this spells doom for both the consumers and the movie service. On the other hand, there is tremendous untapped bandwidth between the local office of the provider and the end user, espically for cable. Place a good server with a terribyte hdd filled with movies at a C.O., and you end up getting the information to the end user faster (or with better quality) without the added expense of having to run outside to the Internet.
3. Usability. They would have to either a: make it very, very easy to use whatever propritary viewing/authentication scheme, or b: allow the user more flexibility in choosing a media player and authentication system. Somewhere along the line they need to develop a system where you can download the movie and play it whenever the user wanted without having to jump through excessive hoops.
4. Value. At present $3 for a movie for 24 hours, even they could increase the playback quality signifigantly, can't compete with the added features of a DVD or the typical 3-5 day rental period.
5. Selection. If the average consumer were to turn to the Internet to rent movies, they would have to be able to compete by providing a selection of movies that would rival the catalog of a mail order rental service or even a well stocked Blockbuster. (15,000 - 30,000 titles would be a good start).
If somehow they could address all of these issues, I could certinatly see more interest in it, but as it stands now, I doubt we will see anyone getting rich renting movies online, or seeing your local video shop going out of business any time soon.
The Internet is generally stupid
The problems that have been mentioned are encoding quality, audio quality, picture size, proprietary up the wazoo, and limited viewing time. But for their first attempt at this, we really shouldn't have expected anything more, so I actually give this first shaky effort two thumbs up for the try. A few things that we can reasonably layout for future attempts:
- Limited viewing time: This isn't really bad at all. Maybe the 24-hour window is (why not 48 or 72 hours?) but remember that you only get a few days at Blockbuster/Hollywood Video too. This is a standard rental model. They're not going to let you keep the movie indefinetely for $3, folks.
- Proprietary format: Whether or not you disagree with proprietary formats and copyright in practice is one thing, but pragmatically speaking, I don't ever expect the studios to release movies in an unencrypted format, especially not with the cheap price of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs now. This is here to stay. That's not to say, however, that a Linux and Mac player couldn't be built, or that the player source code (minus the decryption codecs) couldn't be made open...
- Quality: The Slashdot crowd has access to lots and lots and lots of bandwidth, unlike most of the rest of the world. As such, the ~200K streaming rate they're talking about is all most people can sustain right now.
In summary, I think this is a great first-try for the movie studios. There's much room to improve, but we ought to at least congratulate them on starting to embrace the Internet as a viable means for content distribution, and not simply a ship full of pirates.Boy, this should really piss off American ISPs who complain about a small percentage of users using up most of the bandwidth.
I maintain that businesses such as Movielink won't be able to really take off until they have the blessing of the major ISPs. ISPs need to either say "use all you want" or "you're being capped: be frugal".
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AHMEN Brother!
Who wants to download an 800 MB movie whose quality sucks a** just because someone wanted to save 1-200 MB to squeeze it onto a CDR.
Ok, some of you do. I don't.
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Yes Movielink has issues, (some major) to work out. But as geeks, /. people are far more technically savvy, have bigger pipes and can tell the difference between a 750kbps SBR encode and a true VBR encode. I would take a wild guess and say that of the moviegoing public, people with that level of technical sophistication are less than 5% of the public.
/. users geting the same treatment from Hollywood and the media business. Hollywood wants MASS marketing of films over IP, and Movielink is the very first tentative step in that strategy. It's a test essentially. And personally, I think they did a HELL of a job.
/.'ers take for granted: "broadband" is a relative thing. So the Movielink encoders did the best they could under the constraints they had. I'm sure that if they had encoded into Divx WS VBR, there would be just as many whining "but the movies are too big and take too long to download, this sucks!"
/. think it's perfect, awesome in encoding quality, UI and experience. Not so easy huh?
We're all the equivalent of Mac users, and when people snap back "Macs are only 5% of the userbase, who the hell cares about them?" you might think of
Think for a moment how hard it is to build a service like Movielink. Many posters have discussed the technical aspects. Divx or MS/Real? Well, most PCs can play the latter, only geeks play the former at the moment. Jeez, Divx wasn't even legal till they got rid of 3.x code.
What about bitrate? The developers had to balance quality vs download time. Yeah, I have a huge pipe, so gimme a 1.5gb DVDIVX or SVCD, I have no problem waiting. My Movielink download took 15 minutes. But many don't have the bandwidth many
I won't even get into the DRM swamp. Yeah, all DRM can be hacked, no shit. But the question is, how do you make a relatively painless, somewhat protected experience that won't encourage mass copying and trading by people who can't hack a video driver or run screen capure video software to a gigantic drive?
Then add another few dozen issues: delivery architecture, bandwidth costs...how about windowing? Know what that is?
Movies are released in 'windows:' the first being Theatrical. Forget about seeing VOD in the Theatrical window anytime soon. Too many political issues to deal with, and besides, no one wants to fuck with box office revenue.
Lots of other windows, Airline, PPV, Home Video (Movielink's window), HBO (when no other entity other than HBO can show the film), Broadcast.
So, if you were planning Movielink, how do you offer content that is in a window that appeals to most people, but doesn't piss off your business partners ? (HBO, MSO's, Wal-Mart, etc...) Not so simple.
And remember, Movielink is not a single entity, but a joint venture of five Hollywood studios. Do you have any concept of what it must be like to get five studios to agree on anything? Remember, every movie encode has to be approved by the studio, plus the director, producer and talent. A fucking nightmare scenario. Add that to five sets of movie execs, each who want to put their own stamp on the business, and increase their own revenue.
Now, build a technology that all five sets of movie execs approve, that all five sets of movie execs agree will generate revenue, that all five are willing to commit their most precious resource: their intellectual property.
Now, make it so that the geeks on
Anyone remember what AOL looked like as they changed from Quantum Link (C64/128 only) to a mass market business? It sucked. Remember the first weeks of Amazon and all those 404s? Every business has growing pains and Movielink will have more than most.
Give it a chance.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
These are ripped for high quality, not trading.
Then why don't you use Vorbis -q3 audio instead? About 128 kbps and comparable quality to 192k MP3.. For a movie I think q3 might even go down to an average of less than 100kbps while keeping the same quality because many parts are almost silent and very easy to encode compared to music.. MP3 is outdated and sucks... You can also gain quite a few bits by using OGM instead of the bit-eating AVI and get faster and more accurate seeking at the same time..
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Very simple: Hit the reset button. No, not that stubby plastic thing on the front of your case. I mean reset copyright law back to what it was when the US founding fathers wrote it right the first time. Let works enter the public domain after 14 years. That would mean every movie released since 1988 would be free to distribute. That'd be a lot of good movies legally on Kazaa or what have you. And then Hollywood would have to "compete" against the public domain and actually write *gasp* original screenplays. This would drive down ticket and video prices to the point where people would no longer bootleg to beat the system--also knowing that they were helping to increase the public domain!
Of course this will never happen, because Hollywood is sickeningly corrupt and gluteonously wealthy enough to pay for laws that make them richer. So there's only one option left: boycott.
Vote with your dollars.
You have a period of 30 days to watch the movie BUT, only 24 hours to watch it once you hit "play".
HELLO? The downloader/player program is software running on open hardware. All copy protection schemes for information are inherently crackable, but these kinds should be easy for a competent software engineer with access to good debugging tools. I can't wait for these to start appearing on the net, in ogg multimedia containers no less.