Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.