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Which Movie Download Site Is Best?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the still-costs-to-much dept.

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."

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Which one meets my needs? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Which one give me the following?
    1. No DRM.
    2. Available in the UK.
    3. Fixed rate up to 30-per-month downloads.
    I don't have the disk space or the inclination to archive every film I download - most I only want to watch anyway - but I do want the option to transcode it to something I can watch on a portable device of my choice for when I'm travelling. I can't do this with DRM, so it's simply not an acceptable option.

    Until a company starts caring more about the service they provide to their paying customers than about the spectre of piracy, they won't have my business.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Xbox Live by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    While I understand that this article was talking about SITES, I would like to mention the new Xbox Live service as well. True high definition movies, TV shows, reasonable prices, and they play on your TV (no sitting in front of a computer screen or trying to reencode them for DVD).

    The only big downsides are:

    • The 360's small hard drive--Come one MS, what's with the increasingly bizarre delay on what should be a simple matter--releasing a REAL hard drive (120 GB+)? You promised it over a year ago. Just how hard is it?
    • Movies are rental-only probably related to the small hard drive, anyway.

    -Eric

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. USA + Windows only services? by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do any of these services work on OS X and are available to Canadians?

    I'm getting tired of companies that think "world = USA + Windows".