Downloading vs Renting?

A quick question for those of us that download series and movies etc. with their uncapped connection.

I have 384k uncapped, needless to say it's a mission to download high quality stuff 720p etc which looks far better on my 32 lcd than the SD stuff.

I'm considering scrapping the adsl route and looking to hiring the blu ray items from video store etc.

I currently spend R752 just on adsl and that's excluding electricty to run a laptop 24/7

At least the money will go into my home town
less hassle to monitor and re-download stupid 200mb files
Quality will be far better

What has stopped a lot of you guys going that route - now I'm referring to the guys that download lots of movies and series, u know who you are.

Most video stores don't have a good selection of Blurays

If you watch blurays everyday it could be well more expensive than R752 on a monthly basis?

Video store does not always have new titles, take what you can get.

I don't mind the loss of quality at all, the ease of being able to download whatever you want when you want from the netz is a big + for me.

We have a videoland near us with an entire freakin wall full of blu ray movies and another wall with series I'v never even heard of.
I usually get around 5 blu ray rips a month, quality is pretty good.
Series I get lots of but quality on 32 lcd isnt the best compared to 720p which holds well above the normal sd stuff.

I'm with saol unshaped, maybe I'm going to switch to mweb and use themoney i save for beer or renting blu ray movies and just download series?

How much do you guys pay for blu ray rentals?

We watch series during the week and movies 2 max on weekend's

Well If you rent it you can rip it anyway, right?

Hemps said:

A quick question for those of us that download series and movies etc. with their uncapped connection.

I have 384k uncapped, needless to say it's a mission to download high quality stuff 720p etc which looks far better on my 32 lcd than the SD stuff.

I'm considering scrapping the adsl route and looking to hiring the blu ray items from video store etc.

I currently spend R752 just on adsl and that's excluding electricty to run a laptop 24/7

At least the money will go into my home town
less hassle to monitor and re-download stupid 200mb files
Quality will be far better

What has stopped a lot of you guys going that route - now I'm referring to the guys that download lots of movies and series, u know who you are.

Click to expand...

What stops me is

a] Convenience. You can't simply get home and at 10pm go "oh now in the mood for a movie" . To rent you now need to drive to a store and you need to return it the next morning too [driving twice]. On weekends this is particular annoying if you want to sleep late.

b] Availability . There's no such thing as "sorry it's not in" with online content.

c] Content Variety . DVD stores simply can not keep everything, you'll always find they have popular titles and that's it. If you want to see that golden oldie or cult classic or episode 5 of Season 1 of Alias , good luck. Online you can.

d] Cost . There's subscription services [like Netflix] which are R100 a month for -unlimited- streaming movies. Show me a DVD store that can match this.


Now yes, quality wise , renting is better , no question about it. I don't believe a 4 MB/s line on international is sufficient to successfully view HD content. SA simply ain't there yet. If this content was LOCAL , another story, but we don't have anything useful inside this country in terms of HD Premium Content.


And finally

less hassle to monitor and re-download stupid 200mb files
Quality will be far better

Click to expand...

That's your mistake, you are downloading files, it's a schlep and annoying. On-Demand Streaming imho is where you should be looking. Believe me, if you manage to start using a good solid premium quality streamed service [ hulu.com etc] like what Americans are receiving, you will never want to download and monitor downloads again.

The ability to start up a media player, selecting a movie/episode and clicking play is simply better than TV and DVD rentals and sliced bread. PRoblem is HD content on our crappy 4 MB/s lines are not on, so if you're willing to go with standard quality it's still a much better experience.

Simply put, last night i got home, i logged into Hulu.com, they immediately saw i am following V-2009 [the series] and Flash Forward [the series] . The site immediately told me there's 2 new episodes available for those series....i just click "play" and it starts playing. After it's done they recommended i watch the latest Stargate:Universe or the Classic V-series because that is what others who also watched above series are watching ..again i can just click play. Can it get any better?

How do you log in to Hulu from SA? I tried and it said the content is only available inside the US.

^^By use of a proxy

Penquin said:

How do you log in to Hulu from SA? I tried and it said the content is only available inside the US.

Click to expand...

You need to go via a proxy/VPN service with a server in the USA. There's free ones but they tend to be rather poor and congested, i currently use this : http://www.hidemynet.com/ [not free] . Note, that one is a VPN [not a proxy]. A VPN actually put your entire connection [all ports and applications] through the VPN, where a proxy tends to be more browser specific.

EDIT: If you're willing to sit up with alot of [and i mean ALOT] of ADWARE/SPAMWARE , you can use this service : http://hotspotshield.com/ , it's free and worked last i used it earlier this month, but it's -extremely- annoying so be warned.

Another one i used in the past is a proxy service like http://www.your-freedom.net/ , but their USA servers are utter crap. Their Europe servers are very good, especially if you're gaming on european servers and are having latency issues. But ultimately i prefer the VPN service, it's much easier to setup since i don't need to change -any- settings in any browser or application, i just connect the VPN app and that's it. You can try your-freedom for free though.

These things have more uses than just getting a USA IP though . Just read that hidemynet site on what exactly you can do with a VPN

EDIT: And once you got the VPN stuff sorted you can also use Netflix www.netflix.com , which is pretty much the ultimate movie/series rental site out there. It's main service is posting the rentals to you, but it also streams a large selection....very nice.

Great, thanks for the info. I'll try it out. I am familiar with VPN. I've got a VPN connection to my company network from my home. How is the quality with Hulu & Netflix? Is it like your standard xvid quality? 480p? And how good is the streaming on a 4mb line, is there a lot of buffering required?

Hemps said:

We have a videoland near us with an entire freakin wall full of blu ray movies and another wall with series I'v never even heard of.
I usually get around 5 blu ray rips a month, quality is pretty good.
Series I get lots of but quality on 32 lcd isnt the best compared to 720p which holds well above the normal sd stuff.

I'm with saol unshaped, maybe I'm going to switch to mweb and use themoney i save for beer or renting blu ray movies and just download series?

How much do you guys pay for blu ray rentals?

Click to expand...

Now you have my attention!!!

How much is a DVD movie rental?

I think it's good for series - even 720p episodes, but as for movies NOPE

As example I wanted 2012 720p rip 6.8GB download - so I get it through rapidshare premium, now I try to extract it and one file no. 34 is corrupt, ok redownload and still corrupt, ok get from another guy with same rip and size and nope, he has rared it twice!
So now I'm sitting with 6.7GB of wasted space.
Problem is I have invested in routers R1000.
As I said, I'm thinking of keeping it just for series and then ripping the blu ray, I ripped one last night and the quality is 100% at 20GB
Gonna need more hdd's

Penquin said:

Great, thanks for the info. I'll try it out. I am familiar with VPN. I've got a VPN connection to my company network from my home. How is the quality with Hulu & Netflix? Is it like your standard xvid quality? 480p? And how good is the streaming on a 4mb line, is there a lot of buffering required?

Click to expand...

Quality is what you want it. They both got HD quality and quality settings ranging from 480p [low quality] to 1080p [HD] . Netflix actually determines a reasonable quality based on your connection, so everytime a movie starts it first do a little speedtest/quality check. It will then also buffer based on it, i.e. if your connection is really slow , the initial buffer will be much bigger.

Anyway, 4 MB/s line + International connection + going via VPN = [slow connection] . So for streaming, 720p you miiiight get away with on Netflix, on Hulu it's tricky, HD [1080p] forget it you're going to buffer until you're blue in the face. I tend to watch Hulu on 480p because then there's 0 buffering.

The catch with Hulu is also they don't allow you to buffer the entire clip [i.e. pressing pause and waiting for a large chunk to buffer] , they only buffer like 5 minutes ahead max. They also insert little adverts in the clip [hulu is free afterall, so expect ads] , which is not part of the actual episode stream, so that kind of resets your buffer.

Hemps said:

A quick question for those of us that download series and movies etc. with their uncapped connection.

I have 384k uncapped, needless to say it's a mission to download high quality stuff 720p etc which looks far better on my 32 lcd than the SD stuff.

I'm considering scrapping the adsl route and looking to hiring the blu ray items from video store etc.

I currently spend R752 just on adsl and that's excluding electricty to run a laptop 24/7

At least the money will go into my home town
less hassle to monitor and re-download stupid 200mb files
Quality will be far better

What has stopped a lot of you guys going that route - now I'm referring to the guys that download lots of movies and series, u know who you are.

Click to expand...

Don't you use youro ADSL for other things besides downloading series? ADSL is a must these days even if its a 384 1gb account (R375 with all telkom costs)

I do surf now and again, download PC, Stuff, Hifi magazines but I don't really want to sit in front of pc all day, I do that enough at work.
I have put too much money into it to just drop everything, so my idea is to switch to mweb and just download series and surf, and then hire the blu ray and copy them.

Are blu rays as prone to scratches as dvd's are?

Hemps said:

I do surf now and again, download PC, Stuff, Hifi magazines but I don't really want to sit in front of pc all day, I do that enough at work.
I have put too much money into it to just drop everything, so my idea is to switch to mweb and just download series and surf, and then hire the blu ray and copy them.

Are blu rays as prone to scratches as dvd's are?

Click to expand...

Blu-rays are much more difficult to damage then your average DVD. As for your original point I think you should try and find better sites to download from. I get 700GB a month on a 4MB line and so far in five months I've only had one download go pear shaped and even that was because my media player wouldn't play it but my computer did. When you take into consideration you can download ebooks, music, movies and games you end up saving a hell of a lot more then buying them especially in SA where we seemed to get ripped off a lot.

700gb a month, I only manage 90GB at best, I use well known sites, but dowloading via 384k line sucks and is probaly best suited to series etc.
The movies are way too large...I am thinking of asking SAOL to give me something like mweb where it is shaped during the day and allows me to download during the evening?
I currently pay R499 incl. 384k line
If I switch to mweb which is shaped during certain hours at R150 less?
Wondering if it's worth it, I have not has issues with SAOL and enjoy being able to surf during office hours etc.