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Movielink sucks... but why?
Jul. 26th, 2005 03:24 amSo there's this program called Movielink. You go to soutwest.movielink.com and pick a movie, (the southwest. bit gets you 20% off) and you download it to your computer and watch it, and d00d what a good idea.
Now, somehow, I never saw Pirates of the Carribean. Just didn't happen. So we decided to go home and watch it. I was extolling the virtues of Movielink and how we could just download and watch it. All was looking good: $3.59, no problem. Start downloading, Realplayer format. It shows the FBI screen. It shows the PG-13 screen.... it still shows the PG-13 screen 5 minutes later. Online chat with Movielink customer service. He sez "Just wait till it downloads and then open in the external player." Screw that sez me. So we get a coupon to download the same thing in windows media. Great! Works absolutely fine, starts downloading. Oh! Run out of download. Have to pause for slow connection to catch up. But on the plus side we go down to the basement and find a pair of speakers, so we're not listening on my crappy laptop speakers.
After about twenty minutes, it's a wee bit jerky, so I take it off full screen mode and kill all the running programs. And then hit task manager to make sure that that bastard wmiprvse service isn't crunching away CPU time.... and somehow doing that stops the movie. Which, given their fucking software, means you have to start again at the beginning. To fast forward you have to wait to download the whole movie.
What The Fuck?
Ok. DRM sucks, we know that. But for the convenience of downloading a movie, great, no problem, I'll just pay the $3.59 rather than deal with finding the torrent etc etc etc. Great, it's even legal. But what FUCKING value is there in not letting people fast forward until they've downloaded the whole thing? Exactly how is this helping anybody? Even the movie companies? ANYBODY? Which IDIOT thought this was a good idea? (Does anybody know the idiot in question? No, really. Someone reading this well might. In which case, I'd like to just have a little chat with them and ask them.) Or perhaps someone from MovieLink could explain themselves to me.
So. This put me in the sort of charming mood you'd expect (sorry again, J), and we've got to wait till tomorrow to watch it, because it's like two and a half hours long, which was reasonable when we started trying to download it at 10:30, but ceases to be an option at this time of night. Jaesus. Fuck you, Movielink. J was right, we should have just gone to Hollywood bloody Video.
Now, somehow, I never saw Pirates of the Carribean. Just didn't happen. So we decided to go home and watch it. I was extolling the virtues of Movielink and how we could just download and watch it. All was looking good: $3.59, no problem. Start downloading, Realplayer format. It shows the FBI screen. It shows the PG-13 screen.... it still shows the PG-13 screen 5 minutes later. Online chat with Movielink customer service. He sez "Just wait till it downloads and then open in the external player." Screw that sez me. So we get a coupon to download the same thing in windows media. Great! Works absolutely fine, starts downloading. Oh! Run out of download. Have to pause for slow connection to catch up. But on the plus side we go down to the basement and find a pair of speakers, so we're not listening on my crappy laptop speakers.
After about twenty minutes, it's a wee bit jerky, so I take it off full screen mode and kill all the running programs. And then hit task manager to make sure that that bastard wmiprvse service isn't crunching away CPU time.... and somehow doing that stops the movie. Which, given their fucking software, means you have to start again at the beginning. To fast forward you have to wait to download the whole movie.
What The Fuck?
Ok. DRM sucks, we know that. But for the convenience of downloading a movie, great, no problem, I'll just pay the $3.59 rather than deal with finding the torrent etc etc etc. Great, it's even legal. But what FUCKING value is there in not letting people fast forward until they've downloaded the whole thing? Exactly how is this helping anybody? Even the movie companies? ANYBODY? Which IDIOT thought this was a good idea? (Does anybody know the idiot in question? No, really. Someone reading this well might. In which case, I'd like to just have a little chat with them and ask them.) Or perhaps someone from MovieLink could explain themselves to me.
So. This put me in the sort of charming mood you'd expect (sorry again, J), and we've got to wait till tomorrow to watch it, because it's like two and a half hours long, which was reasonable when we started trying to download it at 10:30, but ceases to be an option at this time of night. Jaesus. Fuck you, Movielink. J was right, we should have just gone to Hollywood bloody Video.
