Live from Iran, Film88

MemFun writes "The now defunct Movie88.com has became Film88.com. These are the guys that are streaming a ton of movies for $1 a piece (but not allowing you to save the movie). Of course, to avoid all the Tinsel Town Club baddies (mpaa) from shutting them down, they are now based in Iran of all places. We just finished watching the free Harry Potter movie they are offering. Question: Does this make me a criminal? I really like the selection of movies they have and stream or not, it's still pretty cool to have the ability to watch some those movies that are never on TV any more."

Didnt detect my RealPlayer

[xtremex]

With Mozilla on Linux, film88 didnt detect my RealPlayer plugin. I have to find a way to bypass their JavaScript...

the low down

[Telastyn]

ianal, but:

You are not in violation of copyright. You may be in violation of a law which makes it unlawful to knowingly conspire to commit copyright violation by the Iranians. The Iranians are not in violation of copyright if they aquired the films in Iran, as Iran afact does not respect American copyright.

Re:IRaN?!

[perlyking]

You might find Iran has better internet connectivity than where you live! Last I heard there was 5Mbps wireless and you could buy prepay internet cards (aswell as normal ISPS).

Legit movie site...

[NanoGator]

Hey dudes,

There's a site called http://www.intertainer.tv where you can watch movies and TV shows. The prices are higher, but they've been around since last Oct or Nov. I've used them a couple of times and they're not too bad.

I think the price for movies is a bit high, but I'm willing to support this site. I'd like to prove to the industries involved that I'll pay for content I'm interested in.

It's worth a gander if you're remotely interested in this stuff. You can find out if it'll suit you or not before you pay anything. (They have previews for movies etc, all for free.)

Re:Let's be reasonable

[TweeKinDaBahx]

And places that rent DVDs aren't?

Do you KNOW how EASY it is to rip/compress DVDs?!

www.divx-digest.com
www.doom9.org
www.divx.com

HTH and RTFM

Re:Let's be reasonable

[Zordak]

The reason they are different than Blockbuster is that Blockbuster is paying a premium price for those videos so that they can rent out (I'm not sure if it's a flat price up front or a per-use royalty, but they are definitely paying extra). This is the same reason that you cannot buy a bunch of videos yourself and legally rent them out. Right or wrong, that is the way the law is written, so until they have royalty contracts in place with the distributors, they are breaking (U.S.) law. If you do not like the law, write lots of letters to your congress persons and encourage all of your friends to do the same (NOTE: if you are not over 18, don't bother. You will be ignored. If you are over 18, you will probably be ignored anyway, but at least you did your duty as a Citizen).

Re:Capturing the films?

[futuresheep]

You mean their website?

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software /v ideo_tools/streambox_vcr.cfm#download

Re:Let's be reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Video shops are NOT required, by law, to pay more for a movie. The First Sale Doctrine gives them the right to rent any movie they acquire legally, whether or not Hollywood likes it. (The First Sale Doctrine is related to preserving a little concept known as private property.)

Video shops are required by market pressure to provide movies in timely fashion. Studios take advantage of this to charge more for "rental" tapes or to push for revenue-sharing agreements (like Detroit wanting a cut of each car rental). (With an artificial legal monopoly on each film, a studio can get away with setting artifically high prices and delaying general availability, to maximize monopoly rent.)

Once a tape hits the "sell-through" market, any video store that hasn't signed a restrictive agreement with the studios is free to pick it up at the normal retail price, and rent the tape all that it pleases.

Re:Didnt detect my RealPlayer (me too!)

[accessdeniednsp]

Here's a chunk of code to detect stuff. This is from 'detect.php' which is what gets called when u click on the '100' or '300' button for "select your bandwidth". detect.php gets called as:

/detect.php?speed=300 << if you clicked the '300' button.

var RealPlayerG2=false;
var real=false;

function navPlugins() { // Detect plugin for Netscape
var plugs = navigator.plugins;
for (var i=0; i < navigator.plugins.length; i++) {
if (plugs[i].name.indexOf("Real") != -1) real=true;
}
}

function openClip() { // checking plugin
var newloc="real_err.php";
if (nav || opera) navPlugins()
else if (ie && mac) ieMacPlugins()
else if (ie && RealPlayerG2) real = true;
if (real) {
newloc="playfree.php";
}
document.location = newloc;
}

<BODY bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" marginwidth=0 marginheight=0
onLoad="openClip()">

The BODY onLoad event calls openClip() which does the checks (I snipped the IE check code for brevity). Then if the checks found Real, then it should open 'playfree.php'. But i can't seem to get playfree.php to do much. I'll hack some more, unless another /. netizen beats me to it.

Hack The Planet!

Re:Didnt detect my RealPlayer

[bupernfut]

Rename "rpnp.so" to "RealPlayer.so" and make sure it is executable.
#mv rpnp.so RealPlayer.so
#chmod +x RealPlayer.so

I found this in the Real forums. Works great.

Actually....

[cscx]

Umm... it's not necessarily coming from IRAN...
(this is harry potter...)

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State
TCP fred:2174 customer.redbus.trueserver.nl:http ESTABLISHED