How to buy a digital movie file?

Factual Questions
1

This is a toss up between here and IMHO, mods feel free to move if it turns away from a GQ trend.

As I have a 3 year old, and a lot of DVD movies you can probably guess where this is going. I’m on my second copy of Finding Nemo and *Shrek 2 *. Since I have both a wireless and wired home network, and a spare laptop hooked up to the tv set, I’d like to find a way to purchase certain movies and have them as just one playable movie file. A .avi or .mpg would work. Something of decent quality, but not 7GB in size. I don’t want this thread locked, so let’s stay away from the “rip your DVD’s and make your own” ideas. Besides, that’s more of a pain in the ass than I’m willing to do. I’m not interested in burning the movie back to DVD, I just want to be able to have a list of (probably kids) movies that I can click on and play. I’d really like it not to require some 3rd party software to play. And I don’t want it to expire…Don’t want the princess to ask for Cinderella IV: The Quest for More Marketing only to find out that some DRM has invalidated the file. I know Netflix says something on it’s website about being able to download movies once you’re a member. Anyone use that service? Do the movies stay playable forever? Need some extra software?

Thanks in advance.

2

iTunes? I haven’t tried Netflix. This link might be helpful too.

I googled “buy downloadable movies” and came up with many links but I don’t know how many of those are considered “good” services.

3

I have Netflix. I checked their “Watch Instantly” service and there’s no kids movies in there. Right now they only have about 6,000 titles, mostly stuff kids would not be interested in in the least.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, let me tell you - ripping a DVD to your computer is incredibly easy. You need one free program, you click a couple of buttons, walk away for a few minutes and it’s done. You can later play them back with any software-based DVD player like PowerDVD, no burning involved. Yes, it does take up space but a 500GB hard drive is cheap anymore.

If you buy the movie, you should have the right to do this because you’re making a backup of your movie. I think we’ve discussed this a few times here on the Dope (I think for the same reasons you have - kids and DVDs). However, I am not 100% sure of the legality so I will defer to other Dopers on that.

4

I’d second the rip your DVD to the harddrive suggestion.

Morally, you should have no qualms about it as logn as you own the DVD. Legally, while you ARE allowed to create backup copies or to transcribe media to other formats as long as you are not distributing (for personal use only) by LAW, paradoxically, you are currently not allowed to break encryption in order to do so. The law giveths and the law taketh away.

Again, I have no moral problems with this, YMMV.

However, there are an increasing number of sites offering digital video for purchase. Itunes, movie link, direct2drive, cinemanow, amazon.com, vongo.com, are just a few off the top of my head.

5

What do you recommend?

6

Easy now…like I said I don’t want this locked.

iTunes uses a proprietary format that requires you to use…well…iTunes to play the movie. I suppose I could just install iTunes on that laptop and then use that as my media player, I’m not terribly fond of the interface.

As for ripping a DVD, yes I know it’s easy…but the end product is about 10 files that I have to remember which one to click on to start the movie. I’d much rather just have one file that has the movie in it.

7

One word: Handbrake

8

Rip it to a MPG file, not just a DVD copy set of files. Many utilities are available to do this.

9

Huh?

Sorry, I feel the wind of a whoosh or something going by me.

10

I doubt that you will find exactly what you are looking for. If someone offers mainstream content as a file then it’s pretty much guaranteed that this file will be protected by some form of DRM. No matter whether publishers actually achieve perfect control over their content, at the very least they limit what you can easily do with their content.

Depending on your location ripping your own DVDs might or might not be legal. The same is true for even less convenient things like (digital) recordings from digital TV.

I would be very, very surprised if anyone gave you mainstream movies as an ready-made unprotected standard video file.

11

Just the Whoosh of the most awesome piece of freeware ever:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21117

12

I have used this feature, and it works well. Netflix supplies the software and periodically updates it. Just click on the Watch Now button and follow the instructions. Once installed, each movie you select starts in a few seconds. You can watch full-screen or in a window, which you control.

Your Internet speed is a factor. Netflix does a test every time you start a movie and optimizes the data for your speed. They claim that the best quality is comparable to full-screen, full-motion, DVD (not HD) quality.

However, you are watching in real-time, sort of. Netflix buffers only a few minutes of data, so if you want to skip ahead, you have to wait for it to re-buffer. That’s only a few seconds on my 5Mb/sec dl connection.

You aren’t storing the movie in your computer except briefly. I suspect there may be programs out there that will capture what you see, but Netflix doesn’t make such a function available.

So they stay playable forever as long as you re-play them and as long as you have sufficient time available. Netflix gives each subscriber 1 hour of viewing time for each dollar of rental fee per month. When your subscription renews, the time count starts from zero; nothing carries over.

They seem to be pretty good about charging you for actual time used; if I pause a movie for an hour, I don’t think I get charged for the hour’s time. And they provide a database of all the movies you watch, when you watched and for how long, similar to the database of DVDs rented.

One word of caution. My speed and computer met the minimum specs by a wide margin when I first tried this, but I couldn’t get the full-quality images. Some tests by Netflix techs suggested that my connection, while running full tilt, had a latency problem. It took a lot of neck wringing and finger-pointing, but I finally got Charter Communications to admit that they had a problem in a hub 300 miles away and it got fixed. Since then, I have had no difficulty.

13

You need more than handbrake. I just finished using handbrake to put a lot of our DVDs onto an Ipod for an upcoming vacation. handbreak does not rip the DVDs it just changes the format from DVD format (MPEG2) to other formats. It will not rip a copy protected DVD.

14

Untrue.
I use it all the time, and it has no problem breaking CSS.

(scroll down to credits)

15

Handbrake is Mac only. Here’s one for PC, free. I haven’t tried it and I can’t vouch for its safety, but it looks like it will do what you want.

Email me if you want info that the mods might not like to see posted here.

16

It appears to be a limitation of the windows version.
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/WindowsGuiGuide

Also handbrake is is available for windows PCs. I used it last weekend.

17

OK. The link offered here was for a Mac-only page, so I just assumed.

18

Are you sure about that? I would have assumed that iTunes movies would be formatted the same as iTunes TV shows and I don’t have to watch their TV shows on the iTunes player. I hate it too. I use VideoLan’s VLC universal media player for almost everything. I think there are a lot of players you can use for iTunes shows, at least, if not movies; iTunes just doesn’t make that clear to you.

19

Thanks all for the replies. I have a lot of software that I need to look at and evaluate now.

missbunny, no I’m not positive, but I know one “music video” that my wife bought was in protected format. So I’ll have to give it a try.

I’ll give HandBrake a try and see if I can get it to work. Thanks for the overview of Netflix Musicat, that doesn’t sound like what I want, but it’s good to know.

Again, thank you everyone.