How to Download Movies from Internet

This is for you if you always wanted to know how those guys next door are getting movies off the internet. Just read on, and you will be able to download the whole internet into your hard disk. Let us clarify every single doubt, whatever silly it may seem, regarding movie downloads.

What do I need to download movies?

Ofcourse, you need an internet connection, a computer and should be ready to leave the downloads on while doing other work or going for a snack.

What size are the movie downloads?

In market, you usually you get movies on CD’s (700MB) or DVD(4.7-8.5 GB usually). Again usually a VDC movie comes on 2-3 separate disks. But on the internet, it’s very important to save time and bandwidth. So usually people distribute movies in special formats like .divx, .avi, .mp4, .mkv etc. No need to bother about the file extensions. These files preserve better quality than the movie on VCD’s but take less than 700MB space. So it is easy to download the full movie and write onto a single CD of yours. Very nice, isn’t it?

How much internet speed do I need for movie downloads?

Well, for all downloading stuff, you need a sufficiently fast Internet connection. Below table shows how fast you can download movies with different internet speeds. Again, your download speed will also be limited by the speed of the source server (the website from where you are downloading). The table below should give you an idea of how long it would take to download a 700MB file (typical movie download) assuming there are no limitations on the transfer speed of the server.

(8 Kbps=1KB/s)

Internet Service Providers usually calculate the speed in terms of bits (kilo bits per second, i.e. Kbps) whereas you may find it easier in terms of Bytes, because you know the size of the video in KiloBytes or MegaBytes. hence you can easily calculate how long it will take to download.

Is movie download legal?

There are legal downloads as well as illegal. Again it depends on your country’s law. Often people put movies online if they want to promote it, or the movie is free of copyright etc.

But now-a-days, you will find plenty of sites giving you movies illegally. What do they get from this? They get publicity, money from advertisers on their site plus they may also ask you money before accessing the file download. In short, use some common-sense to judge whether the movie you are getting online is distributed illegally.

Most illegal movie sharing sites are kind of discussion forums where people share the movie links they have found on the net.

Where do I find movies on the internet?

Sometimes you find movies for direct download on some sites. One such website is redcurtainmovies.com and there are many more.

Most movies are shared by people after uploading on a file host like rapidshare.com, megaupload.com etc. and provide the download links on their personal websites or public discussion forums. A simple search on “movie download forum” or similar terms on Google or Yahoo searchcan give you many websites where you find movie download links. But beware, most of these could be considered illegal in your country. See how to download from Rapidshare.

Apart from downloading from websites, you can also download movies via P2P softwares. P2P stands for Peer-to-Peer (simply speaking, friend-to-friend) download. In this, movies and other stuff are shared by millions of internet users directly from their computers. See details on how to download by P2P software.

A third type is known as Torrents download. This is similar to P2P downloads and is very famous method for downloading anything from internet. In this also, movie is shared by internet users who have it on their computers. See details of how to download with torrents.

What are the fast movie download softwares or download tools?

Huge downloads can be managed by softwares commonly known as ‘download managers’. Please see the section fast download tools.

How to play downloaded movies?

Usually, the movies you get to download on the internet are in .avi, .mkv, .divx formats. Get vlc player (freely available at videolan.org). It will play almost everything. Also you get movies in mpeg, .dat (as in a VCD), .vob (as in DVD) that can play on your default media player. Quite often, the downloaded movies appear corrupt and your movie player refuses to play it. You may see the artcle how to play downloaded movies for more details.

How to check movie print quality How to know if the movie quality is good?

When you get links to download the movie, usually you already have seen the screen shots of the movie there. Otherwise there are various ways to preview the quality of partially downloaded movies.

Let’s hear from you what else you needed to know about downloading movies online.