I’ll be making a few overseas trips in the next little while so will be catching up on some movie watching. I’ve just discovered 475 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. so that’s been a boon. However unfortunately a lot of them are on YouTube and/or Google Video which seem to insist on streaming them – which is a bit of a non-starter at 9,000 metres.
Still, when you find one on Archive.org you’re in luck and you can download it in a preferred format. No doubt there are other great places to go and if so here is the place to tell the world (and me) how savvy you are on the net.
Also, amongst films available either for free or paid download, here is the place to tell me what movies I should be downloading. Note, I don’t want to watch anything too heavy and requiring of concentration while I zone out up there, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a good movie. Casablanca hits the nail on the head the best here – but I’ve watched it enough times. Besides I take each of my two kids to it in an old cinema – the Astor when they turn 15 and I’ve still got one to go. This time a boy. And it really is a man’s film – which is to say it’s about a man, discovering that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. And then doing it. What a great movie.
As always, all suggestions that are taken up will qualify for a first class return flight to Dubai to watch the panel beaters whip the Troppo Merc Sports back into drivable shape.
Video DownloadHelper add-on for Firefox will allow you to download video from YouTube and similar streaming sites. (Of course you should only download things you’re legally allowed to download…) And VLC Media Player is free video/audio player software which will play pretty much every format there is, including mp4 and flv, and is not bloatware like WMP or QuickTime.
There are any number of youtube download sites. I assume they still work.
There is a firefox plugin which also works quite well for a range of sites (seems to work with google video)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/
Or you could just http://www.getmiro.com/ which has the ability to view youtube clips. These are saved to a miro cache on your hard drive, but you can find them and copy them elsewhere. Miro also indexes many sites, so perhaps is a good thing to get in any case.
Safari caches it’s youtube clips in the same place, so it is possible to pick them up from there.
Recommendations:
Sid and Nancy — stars Oldman. I’d pay to watch him sit in a room and smoke cigarettes.
Solaris is a classic, don’t know how good it is.
The Great Dictator ditto.
I enjoyed D.O.A. from the Film Noir collection at archive.org – it’s aged pretty well.
Thx Aidan, the standard download YouTube video sites that I know of only give you max 20 minutes. But I’ve downloaded firefox and will try that out.
I presume the plugin doesn’t work with Google Chrome?
I think this is the closest equivalent extension for Chrome.
Nicholas
Firefox plus noscript http://noscript.net/ gives pretty good security.
(Google collects too much data for my liking.)
Have used download-helper to download long talks by V.S. Ramachandran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiIVtROrtbk&feature=related … not a bad hour of passing the time.
I don’t know if its on the list but Sanjuro and Yojimbo are two of my favs
And Kurosawa was not bothered by people copying him :)
Ps
This is another interesting Ramachandran lecture