I have found a great legal movie download site which I am enjoying myself. Movies Capital. The premium option is only about $40 for unlimited legal movie downloads for 2 years!  It is a great easy to navigate site, the downloading is easy and quite quick, it only takes about 90 minutes for my mediocre speed connection in Australia to get a full movie from the server in North America somewhere.  My first question was is it really legit. The movies they have are licensed to them to distribute and so that end users can burn on DVD for private use, great!  These guys have been going two years or so now and the movie downloads come straight from their own servers.  Support service is really good too, they even work weekends I believe. Will the movies work on my DVD player?  If you have a later DivX compatible player you can burn it straight to disc in a few minutes and watch it on TV.  This will give you the best quality viewing, but even better is if you can plug your PC into your TV with a DVI, VGA or HDMI cord.  You could even use the streaming option and watch it as it downloads immediately. If you have an old clunker DVD player like me, the DVD burning is a bit more involved. I have Sony DVD Architect which costs about $40 but DVD-flick available here for free is simpler option you can use.  I tried it and it works great.  Recoding the AVI and burning the dvd like this takes a long time, hours, but it can be done in the background. 

Choice of movies: I do get commission if people sign up through my links (which does not affect price) but I really want you to know what you are getting.  The choice of movies available does NOT include the latest A-List movies.  (this would make the price astronomical, think about it)  The late release movies that are available are lesser known titles.  I was actually a bit worried that I had bought into a poor selection at first, but I have downloaded and watched some already, and most of what I have seen so far has been surprisingly good.  Of course some of the movies are really crappy. (but you get that at the video store and the cinema anyway) I have experienced a reasonably good keeper rate so far though.

Conclusion:  Movies Capital is highly recommended for a very economical way of getting good quality legal movie downloads and cheaply adding to your DVD collection.  Great value for money.

I want the latest movies, NOW! I don’t want to wait for them to come to pay TV, and I don’t want to pay through the nose to rent the DVD.  Besides that is a real inconvenience to go down to the DVD shop on a Saturday night, when most of the good ones are already out anyway.  I prefer to stay at home in my jammies. Hey,  even the pizza guy comes right to the door, I can even order it online and not even have to wait on hold.  Well you can download the movies you want.  Perhaps you or someone you know has been doing this using peer to peer or torrent.  I know a few people who do this, they always have the best movies for “free”. I don’t do it myself, and here is why:

1. IT IS ILLEGAL!   Peer to peer and torrent downloading is not in itself illegal, in fact torrent is a great way to download popular large files like shareware programs and public domain material, however downloading copyright material, for example a Hollywood movie, without the appropriate license is illegal.  It is stealing.  I know, in the internet age everyone thinks everything is or should be free, but if noone pays for it, noone makes it.  Some would say its all ok as long as you don’t get caught, and they would not bother prosecuting a sweet little innocent guy/gal like me.  Here is my take on that one: they prosecute those that are easiest to get.  That means sweet li’l ole you and me, not the shady dudes selling bootlegs, they are slick, sneaky and shrewd.  Your buddy bragging about all his latest downloads is an easy target.  Just remember now that the governments have spent all our tax money for the next three generations, they will be looking for some more money.  An easy $100 000 to $250 000 fine sounds pretty tempting?

2. THEY COULD CATCH YOU!  Now most people think they wont bother trying to find and prosecute the average domestic downloading-for-personal-use pirate because it is not worth the effort.  Well there is not much effort required actually.  Just think of  how easily our governments have stripped away a lot of our basic freedoms in order to “protect” us from terrorism for example.  Just a stroke of the pen means they can get your browsing and download history from your ISP.  Wont happen? Well in Australia it is already being talked about in the senate.  They will tell us it is to protect our kids from predators or something to make us feel better, and they will do it in US, Canada, UK, Germany and everywhere else they can find an excuse to follow the precedent. There you go, a days work for a government official, or five minutes from a contractor and they have a lazy hundred grand prosecutable case lined up.  That’s my conspiracy theory for today, I digress.

3. You could get malware, viruses, spybots and all sorts of nasties invading your computer from downloading from unknown sources.  This to me is not as bad as going to prison, but still not good.

I hope I have discouraged you from following that path, but here is the good news.

You can download movies legally. 

Review of a totally legit movie download site

Beware of Scams!

Next we will look at some ways to get legal movie downloads

Technorati Tags: best movie download site, download films legally, download movies legally, internet movie download, legal movie downloads

With over 4500 TV channels available, you should never have nothing to watch. Trouble is, cable and satellite TV is expensive and still you have a limited number of channels, most of them standard definition, you need a technician to come and hook it up and you pay for it month after month.  I have found a really cheap and easy solution to unlimited live and download TV.  If you are really keen you can actually find some of this stuff on the internet, but you can spend ages looking for it only to find that you are in the wrong country or it shows up only in a small pop-up screen and you can’t record  anything.  Stream Direct has aggregated over 4500 channels from around the world, and made them easily available in HD compliant widescreen format so you can easily select and watch whatever you want.  All it takes is an internet connected computer and a few minutes to install the software.  Even better, there is only one payment, probably less than your monthly cable bill.  Too good to be true?  I thought so too so I looked into it in detail, the main downside is that you will not get premium pay tv channels like Showtime, HBO etc.  In fact, if you really know what you are doing (and have a lot of time on your hands) you could probably find some of the content for free in some form on the internet. It is all free to air content.  But if you want a trouble free TV experience, Stream Direct is the way to go.  Watch it on your PC or plug it into your TV screen.

At time of writing there is a great bonus offer of a FREE DVR program so that you can record (30 day trial only)

This site here has a good selection, http://www.publicdomainflicks.com/ the movies are in mp4 or mpeg-2 which are quite big and cumbersome to download, but they look good.  You can even watch them live streaming.

Here are some more sources of films distributed for free:

Film schools

Film makers, short film projects