Now that I have this computer, with 2X as much RAM and processing power, and 3x as much HD space, I begin to see what people mean by the possibility of giving up cable and watching TV online. The CBS website, here offers every episode of the original three seasons to watch for free. ST:TOS always had a special place in my heart. I was a little too young to pick up on a lot of the details when it was new, but later, while in college, I used to join the crowd in the TV room any weekday afternoon and watch the re-runs. ST was very popular among the college crowd then.
I lost count of how many times I saw most of the episodes–even the terrible ones like “The Savage Curtain”. I cringed like everyone else at the egregious physical and mathematical mistakes on the part of the writers, like amplifying a sound to “one to the fourth power”. (I understand that science fiction TV writers aren’t scientists, usually, and can’t be expected to have a command of the intricacies of higher math, but that’s third-grade stuff.)
Be that as it may, then I didn’t watch Trek for many, many years. So when a few weeks ago I saw that these shows were available, there were definitely a couple that I would like to see again. I tried it out, and they work great on my computer, which is more than capable of handling them. There’s just one problem though. They don’t let you really control the presentation very much. There’s a pause button, but if you use it and then ignore the website too long, the show shuts down or resets. There’s no fast-forward or rewind, so in a nutshell you have to watch the episode straight through.
Stipulating that I don’t want to break any laws here, is there a way to download a TV show from such a website into a format that allows the typical viewer controls? Or is this the company’s way of getting me to buy the DVDs? I can see why they wouldn’t want to give me free content when they sell it on media for actual money, but I more or less assumed that if they were going to give us these to watch, we’d at least be able to watch the programs on our PCs with complete control, and just not be able to make discs out of them.
(BTW a one-hour show in those days apparently had only nine minutes of commercials! Each episode is 51 minutes in length, uninterrupted.)
Are they all ad free now? When I first went to it several months ago (hell, maybe even a year ago, I can’t recall) they had one 30 second ad every 10 minutes or so. Then the other week I re-watched the Veal episode from quite a few seasons back and it was ad free. I thought maybe it was just a glitch in that episode.
Complete control? Ho ho ho, you funny man! The only time you get complete control is when you buy the DVDs, and even then that’s only because it’d be too expensive for them to send someone to watch you and take the DVDs away if you do something they don’t like.
That said, your description of CBS’s player sounds pretty crappy. Hulu’s video player is much better and does allow for indefinite pausing and playback.
But when you say there’s no fast-forward or rewind, do you mean there’s no playback bar on the screen at all? Web content usually doesn’t come with FF or RW buttons; you have to click on the bar, and the player will jump to that point in the video. Is it possible you’re overlooking that?
Just looked at that player. Instead of clicking to where you want you drag the slider to the position you want it at. Play with that. if it isn’t doing it right away it might still be buffering the video and just need a little time.
And I used firefox when I did it. So that isn’t the problem.
Missed the edit window, so I’m sorry but just throwing in the the clicking method is working know that the episode is all buffered. Hope you figure out why it isn’t working for you.