Hey folks. With the airlines charging $5.99 for their pay-per-view movies, it’s time to start bringing my own to play on the laptop. Any suggestions on sites and methods to best download movies? I have checked out ZML and will give them a try but would like to hear other ideas as well.
Also, is it best to download them onto a thumb drive and play from there? I assume that they would suck up a lot of space on the hard drive of your laptop.
Thanks,
robert
Legally or Illegally?
I think Netflixs offers downloads these days.
~Matt
I’ll go the legal route. I’ve looked into Netflix and will investigate again. Thanks.
robert
itunes?
I second the legal route.
I used to be in-house counsel for a wireless networks company. Part of what we did was build and run the wireless networks that you access in shopping malls, airports, etc. all across the country. Every once in a while, we’d get a nastygram from a movie studio threatening us with legal action after their copyrighted content (read: a movie) was downloaded using illegal means, and the studio tracked it to one of our IP addresses. We were legally ok due to the protections afforded by the DMCA, but my point is that studios can and will track you down if you’re not a) technically knowledgeable, b) creative, and c) careful.
Pay the relatively nominal amount for the material. Getting nailed for illegal downloading can be very, very expensive.
I have a Blackberry Storm. Gorgeous 3.5" 480x360 screen that is perfectly capable of watcing movies on. It comes with an 8GB microSD memory card. I have recently learned how to rip DVDs that I own and format them for storage on my phone’s memory card so I can watch 'em on a plane, in a train…etc etc etc. Each full length movie comes out to about 1.2 GB or so, so if I wanted to, I could easily store about 6 movies on one Micro SD card.
Of course, you can just as easily rip DVDs and put the resulting file on a USB flash drive for use on a laptop.
Note I am not advocating doing anything illegal. I am talking about ripping DVDs that I already own and for my own private use.
Couldn’t you just watch the movies via the DVD drive (assuming your laptop has one)?
I don’t travel much but when I know I’m going to be on a long plane trip I rent a couple of movies to put in my briefcase. Then I can watch them on my laptop and not have to rip or download anything.
Well the geek inside me says that using your DVD drive consumes more power than a flash drive, so if you’re battery limited…
I bet if you put movies on a flash drive, you could set your HD to spin down and still be able to watch them, which is even more power savings.