Where / How to download films (legally)

[Slipstreem]

You're very welcome.

If it's just for viewing on the tablet then I'm sure SD res would be fine and it'd sure save you a lot of space compared to your current HD encodings. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maintain two archives or not, one at SD and one at HD.

The quality of my SD profile is considerable overkill for a 7" 800x480 res tablet screen, but it seemed to make sense to have them good enough to watch on the 32" TV too so as to save having to encode everything twice and maintain two archives, one for the small screen and one for the large.

I could have probably squeezed it down to get 40 full-length movies onto a 32GB card if it was for the small screen only, but I'm not greedy, so 30 is enough for me.

[Oidal]

I've used this, if you're not bothered about size. I then rename output file .mpeg. It's free & quick.#


http://beginwithsoftware.com/videoguide ... stool.html

[cantisque]

I would be using it for videos very infrequently, when I go away from home for more than a day, so I would probably spend a few hours encoding the ones I want to bring with me the night before as a batch job. No need to maintain a library, I usually don't hang onto my vids very long, delete after watching mostly.
Were I to use it for movies at home, I would probably just stream it, hopefully it can do that (my Blackberry can't!!)

[Slipstreem]

I've used this, if you're not bothered about size. I then rename output file .mpeg. It's free & quick.#


http://beginwithsoftware.com/videoguide ... stool.html

That's a handy looking tool, but bear in mind that we still have a 4GB maximum file size limit to contend with due to the FAT32 format used by the microSDHC card in the Essential/Excel, and many movies come to more than 4GB when all VOBs are joined.

Although DVDShrink is now outdated and won't rip some recent DVDs (so we still have to rely on a recent version of DVDFab for that stage sometimes), it can still join decrypted VOBs with an option to shrink them down to a user-specified maximum file size. It does throw away some quality in the shrinking process, but I doubt it'd be enough to notice on a small screen and does save umpteen hours of transcoding time if it's just for a 'watch once then throw away' approach.