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."

Comments

This one!

[Anonymous Coward]

btjunkie.org

the best movie download site

[b4stard]

Short answer: TPB
Long answer: The Pirate Bay

Not yet good enough for me.

[PrinceAshitaka]

I think this technology is still cannot compete with having the actuall DVD sent to you. I usually on't mind waiting one day.

I use dvdone.com.

I get the DVD the next day before noon if I order by 5pm. (and the movie is not rented out)

I can pay online with wa wire transfer

I pay less than 2 dollars for shipping up to 4 DVDs round trip

I can rent as many DVDs as I want, renting many DVDs does not affect when they ship the DVDs I want. (ahem netflix)

Sorry if this sounds like a plug but it is not, I just want to tell other people what is possible so other companies improve thier services (ahem netflix).

Windows services

[AnyThingButWindows]

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...

Which one meets my needs?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Amazon Unbox

[Danathar]

They Rated Amazon Unbox as high, but OBVIOUSLY they had not tried to uninstall the software. As they would of found out, Amazon's idea of "uninstall" is different from what most people think as they leave services installed and RUNNING on your system.

How about none?

[Salvance]

"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.

Young whippersnappers!!!

[caffeinatedOnline]

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

Re:BT

[Itchyeyes]

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.

Torrents are Real

[PopeRatzo]

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.