Which Movie Download Site Is Best? 205
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."
This one! (Score:4, Insightful)
BT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here, if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
( 6 GiB * (1024 MiB / GiB) * (1024 KiB / GiB) * (1024 B / KiB) * (8 b / B) )
Faster than NetFlix (Score:2)
That's one way to do it.
Another way I hear is fairly popular is this company called NetFlix, where they actually snail-mail your movies to you. That's at least a day of waiting, yet their business model doesn't appear to be in jeopardy. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations:
( 1.5 GB * (1024 MB / GB) * (1024 KB /
Re:BT (Score:4, Insightful)
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These services only serve up sub par quality. I can get HD rips of Movies on bittorrent sites or regular DVD rips at Full quality and resolution.
IF they want to have a legal service they had better up the quality to as goo or better than what I can get elsewhere.... Oh and have it in a format I CAN PLAY on my hardware.
I cant find ANY legal movie downloads that will play on my HTPC.... No I will not downgrade to Windows Media Center, I enjoy a HTPC that works very well and has features well beyond w
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depends (Score:2)
Edonkey may be slow, but only there you can find those old, rare, or obscure movies.
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easy answer (Score:2)
piratebay.org
itunes
the best movie download site (Score:5, Funny)
Long answer: The Pirate Bay [thepiratebay.org]
Apple's iTV (Score:3, Interesting)
1) you can download movies in high res
2) watch them on the TV
3) Burn them to DVD one time
4) You can keep the digital copy on your hard drive as long as you want, but it will only play on that machine (or iTV)
plus you can play a normal DVD you rented on your mac and your iTV will tivo it for viewing later after you return the disk. You cannot reburn these or move them to another machine but you can view them later on that machin
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1) you can download movies in high res or low res - your choice!
2) watch them on the TV (Burn to disc and play in your Divx/Xvid-compliant player, now $50)
3) Burn them to DVD as many times as you like
4) You can keep the digital copy on your hard drive as long as you want, and it will play on any machine regardless of platform, using open-source codecs and players
In order to compete, legitimate download services (not that TBB is totally illegitimate, I mean,
Lots of reason to prefer this to BT (Score:2)
Finally it may well be using BT as the conduit. For all I know one could imagine it would be a way you could actually re-sell your bandwidth using BT. if you are a seeder for some movie ma
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Torrents are Real (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think there's some truth to what you say. I suppose it's true that artists will always produce art. But I might wonder if they'll be able to make a living from their art. It's true that the media compani
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It's actually really simple: People will pay artists to create.
Just like people pay me to program.
Information that hasn't been created yet still has instrinsic value.
That value is something the artists can charge money for.
-metric
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How do "free" copies of media benefit man-kind? Moreover, how do these free copies benefit mankind more than c
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It's not that I believe I have a right to "free" copies of media. I believe that the system of "ownership" of creative work that has emerged in the past decades is completely out of whack. Do you think Mozart got paid every time an orchestra performed his work?
The part of my original post to which I am most strongly attached is the belief that the ownership of ideas should not be transferable. Yes, of course artists should be able to sell their work, but not to convey the right to profit from it in p
Re: Torrents are Real (Score:2)
I see this 'creative people will always have ideas' line a lot, but I don't think it's actually helping the discussion; it's almost a straw man. Because the problem isn't only about having ideas; it's also about developing those ideas into something that people can enjoy, or at least experience.
Different fields of creativity make that more or
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No, what you are is a criminal and one that puts even more evidence in the hands of the MPAA and RIAA to to and get Congress to criminalize any use for torrents, include legal, educational ones.
What? Make more laws that people will ignore? Yeah, that's the ticket. It certainly worked well for Prohibition, didn't it? I've seen more people talking openly about file sharing lately than pot smoking. If people don't want to obey a law they won't obey it, and when enough people don't obey the law then the law mea
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It's civic disobedience when an Aussie rips a CD he bought and puts it in his computer and iPod. It's a stupid law.
It's morally wrong to get content without paying for it (if required, ex: commercial releases). People work hard to make those stories/songs/movies/etc, they have the right to be paid. The fact that you want it for free doesn't make it right.
What's wrong is copyrights that last for decades, then get pushed back
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If the original spirit of the copyright law was set for 30 years, then everything from 1976 and earlier should be up for grabs, no matter what the current laws are because those new laws were made by lobbyists for the industries.
My question is though... why is that right? Why should someone, who's still alive, who made a movie/song back in 1970 say, not still be getting money from it if people are still wanting to buy said movie/song?
Sure you can go on about copyright being in the hands of the record companies/studios etc. rather than the artists, but that's another argument.
The argument I'm trying to resolve is why should the artist just stop making money from something they made 30 years ago?
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Because that's the spirit of copyright. You're protected for 30 years, then it falls into the public domain. Without copyright, everything would fall in public domain the second after you're done making it.
Copyright was meant to protect the authors for 30 years, as an incentive to create new works. After that 30 years, they should've made new works.
You're not getting paid for something yo
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Conversely, why should someone who made a movie/song today be getting money for it in the first place? It's equally debatable...
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It's called civil disobedience. When laws are written by big biz, these methods is what the rest of us must resort to.
No, what you do is almost certainly not civil disobedience. To call it civil disobedience, you have to have an explanation as to why the law you're breaking is wrong, and an idea of how the law should be. Further, your actions must be in harmony with the "correct" version of the law, as you see it.
While I'm sure that you have good reasons why the current law is wrong (I probably have more complaints about it than you do!), just what do you think it should be?
Do you think copyright should be shortene
Not yet good enough for me. (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Windows services (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Piracy is NOT fair use! (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair Use is a good thing, and we should have it, but Fair Use has nothing at all to do with being able to watch movies by yourself for free.
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Which is a fair point if you want to own a movie, but not if you just want to rent one to watch. You have to implement some kind of DRM or the rental model simply can't work for downloadable content. While it would be nice to implement a cross-platf
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Also complaining that the service doesn't work on Linux is like me complaining it doesn't work on my Amiga or my toaster. It's not relevent. It might be something that stops you taking advantage of it but it doesn't make it "broken" and it certainly doesn't give you the right to pirate.
Which one meets my needs? (Score:5, Interesting)
- No DRM.
- Available in the UK.
- 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.
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It ain't the price that makes torrent sites a far more compelling offer.
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And DRM means no money, as the end users will get the non-DRM'ed versions elsewhere instead.
"You can't produce a film in your basement"
Well, true, you need a kitchen, a livingroom and five PC's (see Star Wreck)
That aside; if you instead
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That's what i've always wondered. Advertising must be driving up the cost of things by an enormous amount if it is subsidizing the cost of t.v. entertainment as much as the price of downloadable content would suggest.
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The real money comes from ads, ads and ads.
Which people wont watch if they cherrypick their downloads.
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http://lives.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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Yes, a lot of people have done a lot with a little. But I have yet to see a fan film that even APPROACHED the quality of a studio film. The closest I've seen was probably "Star Wars: Broken Allegiance [brokenallegiance.net]." And that was produced on a $10,000+ budget with professional actors and crew-members donating their time (not exactly a "basement" production). And even it looks shoddy in
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Let's face it, given the option most of us would download a free movie rather than pay for the same legit download DRM'd or not.
Given the choice between supporting the producers of media I consume and not doing so I will, all other things equal (and the price being reasonable) support the producers. Given convenience and inconvenience I will, all other things being equal (and the price begin reasonable), choose convenience. Currently, we have two options:
Amazon Unbox (Score:5, Informative)
How about none? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Young whippersnappers!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have used Newsparrot [newsparrot.co.uk] to find public open servers before, seems to work well.
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Remember the first rule, jerk! (Score:2)
The second rule of usenet is - see the first rule.
Now, be quiet and go have a glass of shut the hell up!
(p.s. I kid, I kid...)
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Forget about the community that has evolved from Usenet, the history, etc. It is the age of instant gratif
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My fav (Score:2)
Xbox Live (Score:4, Interesting)
The only big downsides are:
-Eric
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I've heard a lot of good stuff about it, though - the launch week issues have cleared up nicely, and the selection is getting better constantly. It also "just works", which isn't something to be ignored, either.
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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 har
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Well, pardon me if I sound a bit harsh, but how hard is it for you to understand that when MS says they will do something that doesn't mean they will actually do it? This wouldn't be the first time they announced features that bring there offerings on par with or ahead of the competition, got people to buy their products, a
none (but unbox comes in second to 'none') (Score:2)
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Torrents (Score:2, Insightful)
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It used to be that Mr. Willoby was a rare person, and hard to find. He was quite popular and outgoing. Now, there's so many of him that every small community has at least 1. It's too easy to get the stuff online now. You can even get it online qu
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Mr. Johnson and his 4 kids could care less about DRM because if he *IS* using an online service to get movies, he either accepts that he can't burn it to DVD and just watches it once or he uses CinemaNow and pays to burn it. When he shares with Mr. Willowby, it is b
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It only punishes those that can get around it, so it is counter-productive. Most people would never notice DRM or lack thereof. They want to use it once then delete it, never sharing it. DRM is a useless cost, added inconvenience, and drives those with portables and such into just breaking it (or getting it illegally from someone else that broke it). DRM exists solely to hurt the consumer, removing their Fair Use rights and restrict their
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"What I always find funny about this argument are that the main people that complain about DRM are also the main ones that are essentially stealing the digital content that DRM is supposed to protect from (albeit doing a poor job in the process)."
Well put. If I were with the MPAA and read all these messages that state (in effect) "I pirate because I don't like the DRM," this wouldn't be a huge motivation for me to drop the DRM.
You see, saying "I pirate because I'm cheap" makes you look... well, just c
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Movie download sites and the long tail (Score:2)
And then there are all those indie movies that don't get a distribution deal with one of the Big Few, so they're doomed to obscurity. They may never show up in theatres or on DVD. All that's needed is a download site run by someone with more vision than the MPAA.
Public Domain torrents (Score:2)
All I need to know (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
Screen. Like. Buy DVD when it comes out.
Screen. Don't like. Download something else.
Heck, I even pay a monthly fee for my access - it makes it realatively easy to search, easy to download, and I get music as a bonus.
Oh, sure it would be nice if it were legal. Bonus points for easier serachability and a reliable back catalog. But for now, I'm happy with it.
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Amazon? Hell no (Score:4, Insightful)
USA + Windows only services? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm getting tired of companies that think "world = USA + Windows".
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Besides, this is Slashdot.ORG not Slashdot.US
If you don't want the outside world to bother you, then follow China and close your part of the internet to outsiders. IMHO that's the kind of thing Dubya would like very much.
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Beware of MovieFlix - They SPAM (Score:3, Informative)
But what gets me is their SPAM practices...
Go and enter your email address in their "unsubscribe" portion on their website (without first subscribing).... You will start getting emails every month saying "we want you back", etc etc...
I filed two BBB complaints in the state of California... But it was only a waste of time.
Hidden download costs (Score:3, Informative)
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Wait, why do you have to pay and extra 50 if you have a 100GB bandwidth cap? Wouldn't that only apply if you're already used up all the 100GB you were alloted?
What about iTunes? (Score:2)
this is a simple problem (Score:3, Insightful)
They want us to pay more for "online content" and from what I can tell, that's the only feature above and beyond what you would get with a DVD or rental. Its "online" so they want me to believe it should sell for a premium compared to its offline equivalent. $6 for a movie (or so) AND you have to wait until tommorrow to watch it (because of bandwidth). And I am not even going to get into the DRM issues or the quality of the videos.
If they were really serious about this, they would offer online content at a discount. Doing this would increase adoption and might just make it a real business. As it stands now, only "testers" are playing in this market and with prices that high, for such a low quality product, its no wonder these sites are flops.
There is no online movie market because there is no "value" for the customer. In other words, the alternatives (offline, pirate sites, etc) are MUCH better offerings and people have clearly shown they will pay THAT cost because they are getting good value for their money. Not so with the online movie sites. They are, quite simply, a rip-off.
XBox Live and iTunes ? (Score:2)
Not time (Score:2)
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1. Cable is shared. I wonder how long it would take if everyone in the neighborhood decided to download 8gb dvd.
2. aDSL is dedicated but some areas don't reach 1.5mbps.
As I said before, Verizon has everyone going in the right direction with Fios but I would still like to see T3 lines attached to houses.
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