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Which Movie Download Site Is Best?
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has reviews today of five internet movie download and rental services. The services/sites — CinemaNow, MovieFlix, Movielink, Amazon's Unbox, and Starz's Vongo — have various takes on how online feature-length films should be made available over the internet. CinemaNow has the most alternatives: Free, Subscription, Rent, Buy, and Burn to DVD, while the others offer some subset of these choices. Amazon Unbox has the best video quality, using a 2.5Mb/sec bitrate and VC1 encoding, while CinemaNow is the only one that lets you burn DVDs. There are still disadvantages to getting movies this way, but VOD is making headway, as these services show."
btjunkie.org
Sorry, I hate to be the one to bring this up. But you mentioned "Windows ONLY" websites. The sites don't work with anything but that one OS, and the downloads are infected with DRM on top of that. Until any of the sites mentioned WORK, then I will not use them.
So I have to be the parrot and repeat what others have said so far. Pirate Bay, and Demonoid are my 2 movie download 'services'. They are the ones that allow you to practice your "FAIR USE" rights, and copy to media, CD, DVD, thumb drive, etc...
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
"Which Movie Download Site Is Best?"
I think the real question is "Which movie download site sucks less". Really, none of them seem very good. When I want to watch a movie, I don't want to wait 12 hours for it to download and then watch it on my computer screen. And the burnable movies quality are awful, even compared to a standard DVD, let alone HD on-demand via cable.
I still think we're years away from a large percentage of the population downloading their movies. Before any of these options become viable, average download speeds need to hit 50-100Mbps and computers (or TB capacity video iPods/game consoles) need to become part of the family room, not the office.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Bittorent... blah. Usenet is the only way to go. Been around longer then the world wide web, and most ISP's have a news server, so your download speeds are usually as fast as what the ISP supports. alt.binaries.multimedia FTW
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
Sadly, the illegal path provides the best way to QUALITY movie downloads. Encoded in xviD and around 700 Mb per movie. Sometimes sites will have a hanheld category with the same movies optimized for portable video players like the PSP and the ipod. Then there's torrents of either full DVD isos or re-encoded video with extras. Sadly, when these video services started their first plan was to create a DRM system that was "maybe possibly sometimes not able to be broken". they shot themselves int eh foot from the start. I think in the early days CinemaNow had player compatability problems: http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/06/cinemanow-claim s-94-of-download-to-burn-dvds-work/
If you're going to offer movies offer content, not some haphazard way to hinder my purchase. there will always be the perosn who gets it for free, no matter what. Hindering legal online purchases leads people to get the stuff for free. I don't think Mr. Johnson, with his 4 kids, plans on selling a movie he purchased over the internet to Mr. Willowby across the street and not let the MPAA in on theri greedy share. Chances are Mr. Willowby will buy a different movie and *gasp* they'll share the movies, which has been going on since the invention of VHS.
In short, torrents are the best way to get DVD quality movies from the tubes to your....tube. Anythign else is a system built on maybes and is slaved by people makig hand over fist. If you feel really bad buy the DVD later or send the studio itself a check for $15.
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
I think the biggest problem with most of these services is that the technology just isn't there yet in the US, primarily the bandwidth. My personal favorite of the video download services is Xbox Live. For $6 I can watch a HD full length movie on my TV in my living room. The copy protection is restrictive, but it's usable. The biggest problem is the download time. It takes about 10 hrs to download the 6 GB file over my cable modem. At this rate, it's no longer an impulse buy. I have to think out ahead of time when I will want to watch the movie and plan accordingly. This puts it at about the same convenience level as Netflix, erasing any benefit it would have had.
Bah I remember the good old days when people used Usenet for what it was meant for, actual text messages for others to read and reply to. Then you kids came along and couldn't tell the difference between ftp and nntp and fucked up Usenet good. Usenet is not and was never meant to be file transfer network so stop using it as one! Doing so is at least as perverse as using excel as a database.
Sorry. Amazon is "Windows only" and uses the strict and incompatible Windows "Pay for Sure" DRM technology. No thanks. I'll head to the iTunes store or Torrent sites instead.
All of the BT comments can basically be translated as follows:
Hey, look at me. I'm so l337 I can download pirated material and ignore the law. Aren't I cool?
No, what you are is a criminal and one that puts even more evidence in the hands of the MPAA and RIAA to to and get Congress to criminalize any use for torrents, include legal, educational ones.
Grow up and stop posing as nerds.
Bark less. Wag more.
Agreed. Honestly, if it takes longer to download than it does to drive to Blockbuster and back, then it's probably not going to convince many people that it's worth the added complexity.
Just doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here, if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
( 6 GiB * (1024 MiB / GiB) * (1024 KiB / GiB) * (1024 B / KiB) * (8 b / B) ) / ( (30 min) * (60 sec / min) ) = 28633115.3 b/sec
Not unreasonable, if you have FIOS or one of the superfast DSL variations, but pretty much out of the question for most households.
I think what's more likely to happen is that cable and telephone companies will begin offering PPV videos streamed over a much narrower pipe, giving you the impression of a huge library of movies, but storing them all at the head end. That allows them to concentrate and pool storage in large servers, and reduces the bandwidth requirements. It also allows them to keep tighter control over the content, since it could be encrypted to play back only on their STB.
Most people aren't going to watch internet-delivered movies (that cost money) when the receiver is their computer; it's when the receiver is their cable box that it'll become mainstream.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem with these, and all sites of their kind is simple.
They want us to pay more for "online content" and from what I can tell, that's the only feature above and beyond what you would get with a DVD or rental. Its "online" so they want me to believe it should sell for a premium compared to its offline equivalent. $6 for a movie (or so) AND you have to wait until tommorrow to watch it (because of bandwidth). And I am not even going to get into the DRM issues or the quality of the videos.
If they were really serious about this, they would offer online content at a discount. Doing this would increase adoption and might just make it a real business. As it stands now, only "testers" are playing in this market and with prices that high, for such a low quality product, its no wonder these sites are flops.
There is no online movie market because there is no "value" for the customer. In other words, the alternatives (offline, pirate sites, etc) are MUCH better offerings and people have clearly shown they will pay THAT cost because they are getting good value for their money. Not so with the online movie sites. They are, quite simply, a rip-off.
Those of you who are viewing the comments that say sites like The Pirate Bay are the best sources for downloaded movies as a joke are missing a very important point: They really ARE the best way to get movies downloaded. I've tried a few of the mainstream ("Legal") methods of getting movies downloaded and none of them could compete with the best torrent tracker sites. I refuse to list the names of those sites here because the people who run those sites prefer a lower profile ("The first rule of Torrent Club is Don't Talk About Torrent Club").
When a law is widely ignored to the point where a huge portion of the community is in violation, it's time to examine that law, and the sooner a fresh look at Intellectual Property is taken, the better off we will be as a society. There's no getting around the fact that the model upon which the entertainment/art industry is based is simply faulty and does absolutely nothing to help either the artist/innovators or the consumers. It only benefits a small number of people who have stacked the deck in their own favor at the expense of everyone else.
Those of you who puff out your chests and call people who download movies or music "Criminals" are also not adding anything to the discussion. Yes, I've personally experienced having my own work copied and losing revenue because of it. No it did not me want to stop having new ideas and being creative.
As far as I can tell, the worst thing that happens when the Intellectual Property House of Cards come crashing down is that fewer movies will be made that cost over 100 million dollars. That's OK with me. My top 10 movies from the past year were all in the low-budget category (and the list includes some excellent science fiction, by the way, so those of you who fear there won't be any more sci-fi films if the mega-studios go under are worrying for nothing).
Innovators will continue to innovate. Artists will still be creative. Both will figure out how to make a living and have their work widely available (they're already doing so). The vampires who sit at the top of the entertainment industry pyramid may have to go out and find real jobs, but life will go on.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You might be a troll, but in case some impresionnable types were reading it.... I, for one, only buys stuff that support Linux. Life is too short for windows. If it doesn't work on linux, it generally isn't worth owning. oprofile, valgrind, kate, bash, octave, opengl, fork(), GPL'ed kernel, lots of (L)GPL/BSD libraries, KDE (big one), ordered journaling filesystems, liveCDs... the list goes on. The only advantage windows (for me) had were adventure games. Since games are slowly but surely becoming consoles only, why bother with windows which does less and have a bigger pricetag? And the argument about pirating windows to avoid pirating movies... that is so sublimely stupid that it deserves the 2007 stupid advice excellency award.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
- Free, not very convenient to acquire (have to hunt for the right thing, possible trojans, no guaranteed server bandwidth etc) but convenient to use (no DRM), and doesn't support the producers.
- Relatively expensive, convenient to acquire (search, click on the one you want) but inconvenient to use (DRM) which does support the producers.
Since people use illicit P2P methods more than they use legal ones, it seems that the convenience of acquisition is not an issue. This leaves the question of whether people choose it because:- They want free stuff and don't care about supporting the producers.
- They want DRM-free stuff.
Personally, I consider both options unacceptable, and I want DRM-free stuff that does support the producers. I won't put it on filesharing networks, but even if I did, it's probably there already, so what does the studio gain from preventing me from transcoding it and watching it on my 770, or on my FreeBSD machine?I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unlimited download of copyrighted material for personal use is NOT part of Fair Use.
Fair Use is a good thing, and we should have it, but Fair Use has nothing at all to do with being able to watch movies by yourself for free.
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My personal favourite is demonoid.com. For $0 I can watch a HD full length movie on my TV in my living room. The copy protection is unrestrictive, so I can burn to DVD (and potentially HD-DVD if I bought a burner). The biggest problem is the download time. It takes about 16 hours to download the 6GB torrent over my DSL modem. At this rate, I just tell it to download all the movies I think I might want to watch, then when I feel like watching a movie, I just pick out of the ones sitting on my MythBox that have finished downloading. Until the movie studios provide me with some of that convenience, I'm not going to be paying for downloads. I'd just go back to the method of borrowing a bunch of potential movies from the video store, ripping en masse, then choosing out of the current collection when I felt like watching a movie.