R.C. Ricci

Quite a tough topic to repeat, let alone understand what exactly it is. Online movies simply put are more than they seem. First, just because you've downloaded a movie, doesn't mean you can watch it. Next, so you've downloaded a movie, how about taking it with you, maybe on your ipod? And finally, what about making a copy of it to DVD?

These three basic questions encompass a whole gamut of terms, procedures, and annoyances that are enough to confuse even the ,most savvy of internet downloaders. Downloading movies first means you have to find a movie to download. This involves searching websites (warez, forums and\or illegal movie sites) , peer to peer sites (torrents) or using usenet (newsgroups).

Torrent and P2P Sites
Torrent sites and P2P sites (such as limewire) or piratebay require a torrent client such as bit torrent to be installed on your computer. Once you have the torrent client installed, you may then proceed to searching for movies to download. You should not that torrents are very highly targeted and may often take days to download from. This is because the ISP's have limited and restricted internet traffic in and out of these sites. You may find some great downloads, however be prepared to wait in line to download them.

Warez and Forums
These types of sites are very popular and much less likely to be limited or restricted by your ISP. The most popular of these types of sites are forums. warezbb-org is one of the most popular forums to download from with thousands of members. These types of websites use file sharing services, or file uploading services like rapidshare, or hotfile.com. In most cases, movies are too large to be stored online as a single file, so they are split into smaller parts. This is done using a program called winrar. Winrar can split and join large file archives into their original form.

Uploaders upload movies to rapidshare.com where these movies are split into pieces. These pieces are stored online and their links are made public through the forums and websites. Downloaders can then download these parts of the movies file to reassemble them on theor pc for viewing.

Newsgroups (Usenet)
Usenet is likely the largest source for anything from movies to operating systems. Usenet has been around since the earliest stages of the www and is still widely used. The problem is that is has not changed in 30 years to a point that makes it user friendly as the internet is. For this reason, usenet is still largely overlooked by the masses. The secret is once you have passed the learning stage, usenet has everything one could want. In short, usenet is organized into categories, or threads and topics. These are called newsgroups. Movies for example are organized into newsgroups within alt.binaries. There are dozens of newsgroups dedicated to movies. As there are for games, tv shows, software, pictures and so on.

Usenet is built on the foundation of uploading to the newsgroups in the form of messages with attachments. These attachments can be movies and so on. each message contains one attachment which is split into smaller pieces (the same method as in winrar archives) The downloader can browse the newsgroups, locate what interests them and download the attachments for reassembly on their pc.

Usenet newsgroups also offer a much higher download speed than torrents and regular www sites do. This is because newsgroup (usenet servers) allow many simultaneous connections - some as many as 60 per person. This means that you can download 60 files at once.

Good usenet services are not free however, and most ISP's are starting a trend to discontinue usenet access. This forces the consumer to purchase premium newsgroup subscriptions. There are many companies offering premium usenet access. Binverse, Usenext, and NewsHosting (free 14 day trial) are some examples.

Finding movies on usenet is a little tricky due to the sheer number of messages and newsgroups. It is best to use a usenet search such as nzbseek.com.

Downloading files from usenet requires a newsgrop reader, all of which are free to download. Outlook Express supports basic functions, but should not be used as a primary newsreader. You may try xnews, or forte agent.

Usenet messages number in the thousands upon thousands, and each day more are added. A single movie file may be split into hundreds of separate files, so a convenient solution was devised. The NZB file was created to simplify downloading large files. NZB was developed by newzbin to essentially combine all the parts of a movies, or software etc. into 1 file for easy downloading. The NZB file has changed the way newsgroups are accesed, and has quickly become the largest source of downloading from the internet.

Burning and Playing Movies
So now you have downloaded a movie, but have no idea what needs to be done to load it on your ipod, ro to a DVD. This requires movie conversion and movie burning. For these two terms, you can accomplicsh this using a simple media conversion suite. Movavi, or ConvertXtoDVD are two suggestions. Both offer a free trial. Within either of these software suites, you can convert, and burn movies to DVD. ConvertXtoDVD has a tutorial here, as does Movavi here.

Related Links

• NZB Seek
• NZB Movies
• PC and Tech Tips