Movie Studios Offering Downloadable Movies
Posted by Wade Burchette at 12:00 PM Audio/Video
4 major movie studios -- Lionsgate, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Brothers -- are now making some movies available to purchase and download. The website is Film Fresh. 600 titles are expected at launch, with many more on the way soon. The movies are on in the DivX video codec. So if you have a device that is DivX certified, you can play your movie on it with just by inserting your DVD, USB drive, or a memory card. In fact, some devices will even be able to play the movie straught from your computer (after a complicated setup, of course).
You must be thinking, "this is too good to be true!" And you would be partially right. To start, the audio is only stereo sound, meaning the sound quality found on the first DVD's are very much superior. The video quality is not high quality HD found on Blu-Ray discs. A Blu-Ray disc movie can be 20 GB to 30 GB. It would take several hours even on a fast internet connection to download a movie in Blu-Ray quality.
There is one other catch. Some big internet service providers are metering what you download. The reason is, despite what the PR campaigns say, is so they can raise their rates while at the same time being able to say they didn't raise rates. (Much like how the tax collector will raise the value of your property but didn't raise the tax rate; you still pay more despite what is technically true.) When you download more than a certain limit, you are charge with a huge overage fee per megabyte downloaded. Some caps are large, some small. But no matter what the size of the cap is, the internet is getting more complex. In the not to distant future, you should be able to have a fast enough internet connection to watch a Blu-Ray quality movie over the internet. Metered bandwidth from ISP's will choke that dream. Before you start downloading movies, make sure you do not exceed your cap.
Now you might be thinking, "what is DivX?" Well, I will tell you.
A codec, which stands for coder-decoder, is a method of converting sound, video, or pictures into a format that can be used by a computer or other electronic device. DivX is a video codec. It is a varient of the MPEG-4 codec. Other varients for the MPEG-4 codec are AVC and AVCHD. AVCHD is one the primary standards for Blu-Ray discs.
Like the name suggests, MPEG-4 is not the first MPEG codec. The first is MPEG-1. The second is MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is standard for all HDTV broadcasts and DVD's. In order to avoid confusion with the MP3, the successor to MPEG-2 was called MPEG-4. Each new version of the MPEG codec is slightly more efficient. A MPEG-4 video is about 25% smaller than a MPEG-2 video.
The other major video codec for Blu-Ray is Microsoft's VC-1 codec. This is the standard used by Netflix. VC-1 is slightly more efficient than MPEG-4.
In short, DivX is just a video standard that has been around for a long time and is finally starting to take off.
This new service, Film Fresh, is very promising for older titles. However, I would strongly recommend you not buy newer titles because the DVD version will exceed the version you download, and the DVD version can probably be bought for much less.