There are no lack of websites to do this, in fact Netflix currently has one of the best recommendation engines, but unfortunately is only available for people in the US.

A couple of other notables come up, including Movielens, Flixter and Criticker. However by far the best service I’ve discovered is Jinni, a new movie recommendation engine in public beta.

I really won’t go into too much detail about the site, I suggest you go sign up yourself, but I will say this; Jinni provides the most useful recommendation service I’ve ever used and is also unique in inclusion of the long tail into the system. Many services notoriously suffer from simply sending people to the same popular movies which in turn makes them more popular and more likely to be recommended. On Jinni you’ll get the popular, the obscure and the unlikely.

The engine is based around the Movie Genome, a similar idea to the Music Genome Project used by Pandora.

“Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies”

Because Jinni is using a much richer set of data than the recommendation system at Netflix, it can consequently create much better results and even solve the problems Netflix has with predicting indie if people will like certain indie movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, if you are a big Netflix user – Jinni integrates well with the service including the importing of Netflix data and ratings and the ability to add a movie from Jinni to your Netflix account.

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Thankfully though it is fairly easy to authorize additional computers so that the Netflix Watch Now option is also available on them. The check if a computer may use the Watch Now option is done in the Windows Registry. The Tech Recipe website found a simply way to copy the key of an authorized computer and import it to another computer to authorize that computer as well.

A user who wants to do that needs to start the Windows Registry on a computer that has the Watch Now option enabled. This is done by using the Windows R keyboard shortcut, entering regedit and hitting enter. Now navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Netflix\ Movie Viewer\ and left-click the Movie Viewer key.

Now access the export option under File > Export and save that key to the computer. Now copy that key to another computer running the same operating system. Open the Registry again and import the key using the File > Import menu. The key is specific to the operating system of the computer which means that you cannot import an XP key into Vista and vice versa.

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The movies require a Windows operating system, Internet Explorer 6 or higher and Windows Media Player 11. An experienced user would have already guessed it that there is some sort of DRM involved in this setup and indeed it is. There is no obvious way to download the movies or watch them in your favorite movie player.

All you need to change this is the drm stripper fairuse4wm and a text editor according to DIzzIE from the rorta forum.

Step by Step guide:

• Go to Netflix.com/watchnow and choose a movie to watch
• Click on play, if netflix wants to install the Netflix Movie Installer do that
• WMP should tell you that you do not have the rights to view that movie, hit NO
• Open the source of the website
• Search for ‘WNPlaylistMovies’ in that file, the result should begin with ar WNPlaylistMovies =
• There should be several entries each with a different bandwidth, select one.
• Copy the url that starts with ehub and paste it in a blank new text file, e.g. (http://index.ehub.netflix.com/item/?x=sdjkdsjH)
• Create a html link from it, use this template:
[block]2[/block]
and save it as movie.html
• Now open the html file in your browser and right-click the link and save it. This will download the movie which is usually between 1-2 Gigabytes. It is however still DRM infested.
• Double-click the downloaded file and click Yes when it asks to connect to the website to acquire the license
• Launch FairUse4WM after you clicked Yes and wait until you see that the Play button becomes active in WMP. Click on Recover Keys. It should find some, hit ok and answer the next question with Yes.
• Timing is crucial here. You do get an FairUse4WM error sometimes, just try again then.
• If everything went fine FairUse4WM rips the DRM out of the file and saves a new copy without DRM which you can watch in any video player that you want.

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