Which
Files Do We Select To Download?
There are several criteria to determine if a Movie/TV Show file is what you want it to be.
(a) Carefully read the download title to get an idea of the source from which the file was derived. There are many different sources for movies. CAM usually means the original movie was filmed in a theatre with a video camera. These usually have poor picture quality and poor sound. TS quite often means the movie was filmed as a CAM but the sound was derived from another source, usually from a headphone jack in a theatre for the hearing impaired.
Usually with TV Shows there is less of a problem. They are either web downloads or derived from the on air program itself.
LIMITED DVD Rip (above) may indicate the copy is a 'pre-release' copy of a movie distributed before the official release of the movie which was created to be viewed by movie critics for Awards purposes.
Another classification is
Screeners (SCR) which vary in
quality.
Screeners are usually made for
preview purposes and often have “This Is The
Property Of ….” written across the screen.
There are R5’s. These are early release copies made for countries such as Russia where there is a lot of movie piracy. The idea is if they can produce cheap copies for sale, people will be less likely to copy and share them. The Russian sound is ripped from them and replaced with the audio track from a TS copy. Sometimes the audio can be out of ‘Sync’ with the movie.
(b)
Now we need to know if the movie or TV Show is
any good.
Check out a movie at Internet Movie
Data Base
(IMDB).
Just Google IMDB and then search the
movie or TV Series title you want. You can add a couple
of Firefox add-ons which allow you to
quickly search a movie title in IMDB.
Just do a search
for IMDB in Firefox
add-ons.
You can also add IMDB to your search
engines in Firefox too.
Movies which score 7+ are usually pretty watchable. TV Shows tend to get better IMDB scores. So a TV show scoring 8 or more is worth watching!
(c) I have numerous search engines installed in Firefox. You can add a search engine easily via the Mozdev website. See HERE. One of the search engines I have is IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) which gives a score, synopsis and other information about a TV Series or a Movie.
I also have a Firefox addon called "Selected Search" available from Firefox addons. After adding IMDB to your Firefox Search engines and installing the Selected Search Firefox addon you can select some text, eg the name of a TV Series.
This opens a popup with your search engines listed as soon as you release the mouse button. Clicking on one of the search engines will perform a search in the current or a new tab, depending on your settings.
If I wish to know the IMDB details of
the TV Series "Banshee" from a website, I
'select' Banshee with the mouse pointer, and
up pops the option to search in any of my
installed Firefox Search Engines. I
select IMDB and a new page opens in my
browser with all the IMDB results for
"Banshee".
(d) There are occasions when you may see multiple listings of the same TV show episode available for download. Most likely the differences will be in file's 'quality/format' and therefore the size of the download file. The quality of files is usually listed as 480p (very watchable), 720p (better quality), and 1080p (extremely high quality and sometimes with better audio).
A 480p 45 minute episode of a TV Episode could be a small as a 150mb .mkv download. The better quality 720p version could be 275mb .mkv. The best quality 1080p version of the same episode may be 575mb .mkv or even much more.
As we are using 'free' options it may be more prudent to seek out the 480p .mkv version as it is a smaller file and will download more quickly. If a 480p 150 mb downloads in 5 minutes, the best quality 1080p version would download in about 20 minutes and use almost 4 times the download allocation.
For everyday watching the 480p version is fine. For 'want to keep high quality and best audio' watching, the 1080p version with DTS audio would be perfect. Note to access the DTS audio you would need to connect your 'media player' to your TV via a tuner/amplifier.
Below I have a screenshot taken from the Rapidmoviez website of all the downloads available for a 41 minute episode of the TV Series "Reign". These files from Rapidmoviez and will be in varying formats (.mkv, .mp4 .avi). I know that files created by RMTeam and mSD are matroska files (.mkv) and usually 480p. 'Reign S01E20' translates to the TV Series Reign, Series 1, Episode 20.
Other sites (minirlss, micromkv etc) will be sites which have matroska (.mkv) format files exclusively.
But in the list below there is an episode
labelled 1080p WEB-DL DD5 1. This
means it is very high quality (1080p), has
been downloaded from the web (similar to an
iView online TV episode we see) and that it
has a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track.
This file is 1.6GB to download!
RMTeam has two sources available for
download, one originally downloaded from the
web (WEB-DL) 195mb, the other has originally
been recorded from a TV broadcast (HDTV)
188mb.
Other downloads links in the list below would be in different formats, e.g. .mp4 or .avi etc.
The [OB/UL/180U] means the files can be downloaded from the paid for sites oBoom and Uploaded as well as the free 180upload web site.
For my purposes I would select any of the matroska (.mkv) files from RMTeam or mSD. As a general rule of thumb, RMTeam matroska files tend to be slighty larger than mSD's.
(e) I have installed an RSS Feeder program called "Feedreader". This is a free download. You should only consider Feedreader if you are up with RSS feeds and what they can do.
Having Feedreader installed is not a pre requisite to be able to download movies and TV shows. It is a way of telling you that the next episode of a TV series you are downloading is available.
Into
Feedreader I have added the
RSS feeds where available from the websites
listed
HERE (Current Major Websites
for the Free Downloading of Matroska (.mkv)
Files).
Most of the websites have an RSS Feed available usually signified by this icon. If you find such an icon you can right click on it and copy the link to the 'clipboard'. Open Feedreader and you can then add and name that 'feed' into Feedreader.
You can add multiple feeds for multiple
sites. You can adjust the view, how
many new entries are shown etc for each feed
via options. Feedreader also has a
"Smart Feed" option. This allows you
to do a search within the downloaded RSS
Feeds.
I can easily add a "Smart Feed" for Midsomer Murders. I create and name a new Smart Feed "Midsomer Murders", into the search feed I add "Midsomer". So as a new file for Midsomer Murders is found on the RSS Feed for a website, the singular Midsomer Murders link is listed as a Smart Feed. See a Feedreader screenshot below. Three new copies of "Elementary S2 Ep 21" have just arrived at various websites.
