How to Download and Watch Movies

How to Download and Watch Movies

Disclaimer:

All information given here is to help with the downloading and watching of materials that are not copyright protected. Do not download copyright protected materials.

There are 3 main aspects to downloading and watching movies:

access to the material to download
making sure you get good quality movies quickly
getting the software needed to view them.

I will deal with these individually.

1) Access to the material to download

There are a number of places one can access video files:

The Web,

There is a large number of web sites that offer downloads of movies, but as with all something for nothing deals you will have to put up with a potentially infinite number of popup windows advertising porn, other web sites and ironically, ways of stopping popup’s.

Also the files will invariably be split in to many .arj compressed files that you will have to reassemble once you have downloaded all of them

Suffice it to say I do not recommend this method of download.

IRC
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is, as you may know, a system used for chatting over the Internet (as its name suggests). What you may not know is that within IRC there is a built in file download system.

What happens is, let’s say I have set up an IRC server, I can specify a selection of files that can be downloaded. To do this a all a users has to do is enter a command where they would normally enter in to the chat box and a file download is kicked off.

Sounds good, well, actually it is. The problem is that most of these systems only handle one or two downloads at a time (after all they have to pay for the bandwidth). This means more often then not you will be 56^th in a queue to download a file of 700Mb. You can imagine how long you will be waiting. Even when the download starts, if the connection is broken you are right back to squire one.

I recommend MIRC for all IRC related stuff

Peer 2 Peer

I imagine that will not have to explain this one to you, but I will anyway. Peer to peer system’s allow people to "share" files across the internet. The cool things about them are:

They have built in download managers, i.e. if you connection is broken or you restart your computer it will pick up the download from where it left off.
You can download from more then one person at a time. This means if 10 people have a file but you can only download at 1bk a second, you can download a segment off of all 10 of them at once, making the download work at 10kb per second.
It is *very* popular.

Personally, if you are going to use this system I recommend Kazaa or Lime Wire

Ok, that covers access to the files you want to download, now lets look at how to get good quality stuff quickly.

2) making sure you get good quality movies quickly

For this I will explain exactly how I achieve this.

I use the Peer 2 Peer file sharing system Kazaa. On top of this I use a system called diet kazaa (or diet K). diet K does a number of things. it stops spyware reporting your information to bodies on the internet, it does other stuff too, but most importantly, when downloading a file it constantly requests "more sources" from the file sharing network (this is normally something that you would have to do yourself from the right click menu).

With these two pieces of software you can download a 7001Mb movie in, at best, 3 or 4 hours. But for most popular stuff you can expect to come down over night, or in a day or so. (it all depends on how many people are sharing it and how fast there connections are).

To make sure you get good quality movies follow these guide lines.

Never download a movie of less the 700Mb, anything small then that will be of poor quality.
If you have the storage, get the moves that come in 2 700Mb sections. These will be MPEG2 which will play in most normal DVD players when burned on to CD.
It is best to get a movie that has been copied straight from DVD so search for words like DVD and Screener. Otherwise you may end up with a movie filmed in the back of cinema.

3) getting the software needed to view them.

This can be the trickiest part. There are may ways to encode a movie and (surprise surprise) there are just as many for decoding it. So lets start with the basics:

CODEC

When the moving image is put on to a computer it has to be encoded in to a file. To watch this file it has to be decoded. To do this you need a bit of software called a CODEC (coder decoder).

CODEC types and how to watch them

A dvd or digital TV program (being digital it has to be encoded) is in MPEG2 format. This is a very good quality but it does take up a lot of space (a 40 min program cat take up to 450Mb). Windows (and I assume Mac and Linux) will be able to read these files with no need for new software.

Most of the stuff you are likely to come a cross on the Peer 2 Peer networks is going to be in MEPG4 (like MPEG2 only super compressed) this can fit a 40 min program in to only 80Mb. It relay is a wicked technology. To watch them you will need special software, luckily it is all free.

DIVX

This should take care of most of your move watching problems. Divx is a form of MPEG4, most movies on the internet have actually been encoded with DIVX software.

Once the software is installed you should be able watch MPEG4 movies in media player, but it even comes with its own player, very handy.

XVID

Xvid Like Divx this is MPEG4 codec software. See above.

NIMO

This is a very handy package. It is basically a bundle of audio and video codecs. I had movies that would not play (just get a green screen, or the screens did not update properly) until I installed Nimo.

It is worth baring in mind that it also created a load of problems as well. These where cleared up by un-installing Nimo. You can configure what components are installed.

since 1/9/2004