Friday, May 23, 2003
The Benway Guide To Downloading Movies (If you're not interested in such stuff, skip this post, it'll bore you senseless.)The first port of call when looking for a movie is always going to be Kazaa Lite closeley followed by MinMX
These are both fairly typical file sharing systems where you'll often find movies in mpg and avi formats. However, the movies you'll find here have usually been reprocessed by various movie sharing groups, and the quality can often be questionable. The speed of downloads can often suck too, as very often people just grab the movie they want and then remove it form their shared folder, meaning there are only a few people sharing the file, with thousands trying to download it.
The solution to both of these problems is to go directly to the source, obtaining the movie in it's original form (or as near to it as possible) as it was distributed by the group who first obtained it.
The first port of call is usually an irc channel, the details of which I'm not going to go into, as usually these files are split into about 50 rar files, which then need to be decompressed, rejoined, and have numerous other conversions done to make them work. I know how to do it, but it's a pain in the arse and not really worth the hassle.
So... the next place these files will so up, and a much more useful system is on BitTorrent.
This is a very clever and (I suspect deliberately) confusing file sharing system. Unlike Kazaa Lite or WinMX, there is no search facility, and to make things more confusing, the first time you run the program it will give you nothing but an error message, and appear not to be working. Pretty good for putting those who'd like to shut it down off the trail.
So how does it work?
First, you go to the link above and download the program. Next, you need to go the a website that lists live torrent files, the most popular at the moment being www.suprnova.org. Here you'll find a list of links to various movies, tv shows, software, games and various other files. If you have the bittorrent program, you can click on those links, a small file will download onto the temp files folder of your system which will automatically run your bittorrent program and begin downloading the movie or whatever file you've clicked on. If you don't have bittorrent installed, all you'll get is a webpage or file filled with rubbish that appears to make no sense at all. (Also good for putting off those who don't know what they're doing.)
What happens next is, bittorrent will allocate a space on your drive for the file, making it look like you already have it (this confused the hell out of me at first), and only then will it begin downloading, while at the same time uploading the same file from you to other users. This is rather an elegant system, as it removes the need for large queues as seen on other systems. Also, the more data you upload, the faster your download will come through (usually), which is handy for preventing people from hacking the system so they can download without uploading, and makes the whole thing more usable for everyone.
Now, assuming you've downloaded a movie from bittorrent, chances are you won't have an mpg or avi, but a set of .cue and .bin files ammounting to 1 - 2 gigs, which don't appear to do anything. At this point you can either burn then to a writable CD using nero or similar (I've never done this so can't go into the details), or alternatively, you can use vcdgear to convert them into mpg files which you can view with media player.
Other Useful Sites:
www.vcdquality.com has up to the minute reviews of all the latest movies that have been made available by the various crews and groups.
AVIPreview allows you to preview movie files from Kazaa Lite, WinMX and similar before they've finished downloading... handy for checking that they're not fakes or broken files. (This doesn't work with bittorrent.)
GSpot is a handy tool for telling you what video codec a file needs to be viewed. Very often a file may appear to not be working, when in truth you simply don't have the required codec.
MovieCodec.com is a good starting point for finding info about codecs, and has a large (if sometimes obnoxious) forum which can sometimes be informative.
Steve 11:06 PM [+]
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