Thursday, March 29, 2007

A whole other world

I realise I'm probably the last person on earth to notice this, but here goes...

I kept confusing The Illusionist and The Prestige, and went online to differentiate the two. And I found them both - the actual movies. Both of them.

And so led to the underworld of movies and tv online.

With movies, everything is there, and it's not like it's hidden away: Miss Potter is on Google videos for heaven's sake. There's stuff that hasn't been released yet: 88 Minutes (the new Al Pacino film, which is awful) and The Number 23 and Frank Miller's 300 (which I just refuse to see except on the biggest screen available).

The stuff appears and disappears constantly. The guys who upload them disguise the contents, so you probably couldn't search for 300 and find it (for example, Lost is labelled as Not Found). You can only get to them via portal sites, like this one.

Forget the threat of youtube; that features only snippets of things. The problem is with brilliant streaming sites like http://www.veoh.com/ where you can put up an entire movie in one go. What a copyright nightmare: it's like trying to control the music someone plays in their home when they have friends over.

And so for the lady out there who is addicted to House, you can find Season 3 here or here or here or here (some will break episodes down; some post entire episodes as a single link).

As for me, I took advantage of this discovery to revisit The Tick. What a hero, with his mighty battlecry of 'Spoon!'...

5 comments:

Sean said...

Welcome Orlaith. I think the piece of software you now seek is called bittorrent. You are looking for something called a "bittorrent client". There are lots of them. You install them, search for "torrents" of your fave stuff, and then sit back while it drip feeds them to your hard drive.

The way it works is wacky (and for fans of tecchie stuff only), but suffice to say, when you torrent, you are agreeing to act as a source of torrent-bits for other people also, which makes the whole thing very efficient.

Now off you go and find a never-released episode of Columbo (only kidding, don't know if such a ting exists).

Orlaith said...

But what if there is an unseen Columbo out there?

What was a mindless unworthy distraction has now been elevated to the status of a Grail quest...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this ... will get on this asap. Cant believe I am going to see House ... yum yum yum yum

Anonymous said...

A curse upon you, and your free TV shows! Now I have spent 3 hours watching Battlestar Galactica, I will spend 2 more doing the same, and it is well after midnight. My life is ruined...but I am strangely content.

Orlaith said...

I know! Ruined but content; it's like a modern-day opium den...