Movies can be downloaded, to play on your
PC. and/or burned to DVD.
The better, legal movie download sites offer downloads in AVI format.
AVI is a Quicktime file that can be played on most PCs using Windows Media
Player or similar.
High definition movies tend to be MKV files.
These are quite large files that can be played on such as Windows Media Player,
but may not play too well on the older or slower PCs. However, after burning
to DVD they should play as normal.
With P2P, many movie downloads will be in a compressed, (zip), format
like RAR.
These files are best avoided as they may also convey such as viruses, etc.
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| Downloading |
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FlashGet is a free download manager that resumes
interrupted downloads. |
| Player |
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VLC media player is a highly portable
multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2,
MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming
protocols.
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| To burn an AVI movie to DVD |
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Assuming that you already have a DVD read/write drive,
you will need two items of software.
First, one creates an ISO ‘image’ file: Try DeVeDe, (free),
or
similar.
Creating an ISO file may take a few hours.
Once you have the ISO file however, it’s only a matter of minutes to burn
it to DVD.
This may burning software like Nero, but free or smaller and cheaper burn software
is available.
It is possible that you may already have burning capability on your PC.
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| Movies take up a lot of disk space. |
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True DVD format movies can be 3 or 4 Gb. or more.
DivX is the most popular format for downloading as it is much smaller, (usually
around 0.8 Gb.), with only small loss of quality.
TV shows are around 0.2 to 0.5 Gb.
There are also PDA and iPod movie downloads.
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| DVD Formats |
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You will need to know what format your particular DVD burner uses.
Basically, you have DVD-R or DVD+R. which are ‘write once’.
If you want to record over, then you would use DVD-RW or DVD+RW.
Apparently, you get less errors with DVD+.
There are seven different formats of DVD so you must get it right.
If unsure of the correct DVD format to use, one can try burning
a sample ISO file, and see what type of disk it asks you to put in.
Philips drives, for example, may ask for a DVD+R or DVD+RW disc
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| X Rating |
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X = Speed. If you have a 16x rated DVD drive it would be best to
use 16X rated DVD.
You can use slower DVDs but they will take longer.
If the DVD is rated faster than the DVD drive, it will still work, but you may
need a firmware update from the manufacturers web site.
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