The middle version with a resolution of either 580 or 610 pixels costs $2.99 each and the high quality versions with a resolution of 720 pixels cost $4.99. This is really low ff you compare that to the usual $9 – $10 at Amazon Unbox or other websites. The main question is of course that of legality.

I can only say that this is a completely legal service in Russia paying the usual 15% of the earnings to the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems. The MPAA will most likely not accept the royalties from ZML with the same lame excuse that the RIAA used.

So, what can you expect besides the low prices ? The site uses a very straightforward user friendly layout with several ways to browse and search the movie library. The currently 1500 movies are sorted by genre, letter and can also be found by using tags or ratings.

All movies come with 20 screenshots from the movie and soon a two minute sample of what you can expect. Each movie website lists information about actors, the plot, the format and related movies that are worth exploring.

Movies are provided in DivX v5 or Ipod format and can be paid by Credit Card or SMS. The SMS option sounds interesting because it can be used to download a movie without signing up to the website at all.

The movies seem to be about two weeks behind the official DVD release date. What’s your opinion regarding this new website ? Do you think it is legit and would you download movies from it ?

I personally think that this site is offering way more than all those other movie download sites are offering combined in terms of quality, usability and of course pricing.

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A far better solution – at least for me – is to convert the DVD movies and put them on the hard disk of my notebook. Compressed movies usually have a size of 700 Megabytes to 1.4 Gigabytes which means that my laptop can store several movies without facing storage problems.

Handbrake is a software that lets you easily compress DVD movies. All you need is a Video_TS folder. This is the folder that is on every movie DVD. It is possible to select a preset output like Ipod High-Rez or Apple TV or keep the default one which is simply called normal.

You basically need a Video_TS folder, select a directory and name for the output and click on Encode Video to start the DVD conversion. Several settings can increase the quality of the output. You could for instance raise the bitrate or set a default framerate.

Another nice feature is the ability to queue conversions. You would need all of the Video_TS folders on your hard drive of course unless you want to swap disks after each DVD has been converted.

One should note that Handbrake is not able to convert copy protected DVDs. This means that you would need a different software to copy the contents of the movie DVD to your hard drive (and remove the copy protection) before you can convert the movie further if the DVD is copy protected.

One software that can do this is DVD Fab HD Decrypter. Handbrake is available for Microsoft Windows Apple Macintosh and Linux.

Read More:

Handbrake

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