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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."

4 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. the best movie download site by b4stard · · Score: 5, Funny

    Short answer: TPB
    Long answer: The Pirate Bay

  2. Windows services by AnyThingButWindows · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. 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
  4. Re:BT by Itchyeyes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.