In the Air with Portable Movies
By Lance Ulanoff
December 19, 2002
Total posts: 18
Flying over the Rockies on my way to Comdex in Las Vegas last month, I was marveling at nature's patterns--the mountains receding into foothills and then into sandy jetties that rolled underneath lakes and reservoirs. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger started screaming bloody murder, yanking me back to the full-length movie playing on my laptop.
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Watching a feature film this way is no longer an improbable occurrence. After my not-so-pleasant experience with CinemaNow, I decided to try the service's newest competitor. Movielink, which launched in November, differs from CinemaNow. It offers full downloads, but does not also offer streaming, and it is backed by five major movie studios (MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.). CinemaNow works with these same studios but is not backed by them.
As I've said previously, I don't envision the family crowded around the PC to watch the latest downloaded film. Movielink's CEO, Jim Ramo, seems to agree, saying that while services like his are trying to change consumer behavior, Movielink believes that people will view downloaded movies "in a portable mode," initially. A DVD would give better quality, but Ramo counters that playing a movie from the hard drive eats up less battery power. Listening to his pitch, I realized that my upcoming five-hour flight to Comdex would be the perfect test of his service and its supposed playback prowess.
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You can't transfer files downloaded from Movielink between PCs, so I brought my work (and travel) laptop, an IBM T21 ThinkPad, home and visited the site. Since the site is so new (Ramo called this a soft launch), the movie selection is a bit limited, and a number films listed appear under multiple genres, but there are some relatively new releases and even a selection of classic films. The service has no plans to carry adult content, television movies, or episodic television programs.
Registration was painless, and I learned a key piece of information. Ramo had said a downloaded film stays on your hard drive for 30 days. That's true, but once you start viewing that latest blockbuster, you have exactly 24 hours before it magically disappears from your hard drive (it goes to the Recycle Bin but cannot be played again).
No big deal, right? All I needed to do was download the films and then play them while I was on my flight. Not quite. What the Web site neglects to mention is that the Movielink player's digital rights management (DRM) system requires you to be authenticated ("individualized" is the term Ramos uses) over the Internet--and you can't complete the process without playing the film, which starts the clock.
Movielink's free download-management software queues up the movies you want and even restarts an interrupted session from where it left off. To test the two formats the player supports, I downloaded the Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick Collateral Damage as a Windows Media file and Cameron Diaz's The Sweetest Thing in RealVideo, each for $4.95. Price varies depending on how new a film is. Both downloads were over 500MB, but neither took more than 30 minutes over my cable modem. I was impressed.
To keep within the 24-hour window, I prepared to perform the authentication process for each film a day or so later and started with the RealVideo film. With Movielink you start the playback through the download manager. I clicked Play, RealOne Player launched, and the main screen filled with the words, "We're sorry, the movie you requested is unavailable at this time. Please contact Customer Service." The customer service representative said this was a known issue with DRM for RealVideo and talked me through the authentication process until we got it working. I experienced no DRM problems with the Windows Media movie. Now I was free to watch the films as many times as I wanted--in 24 hours.
First up--The Sweetest Thing. Right away I could tell that the film's native resolution was 320-by-240. I tried bumping it up to full-screen, but the image quality degraded too much. Running at 200 percent seemed better and the film was completely watchable--with the exception of the content, which I deemed unwatchable. I decided to switch to the Schwarzenegger film in Windows Media format. It, too, played at a native resolution of 320-by-240 and looked best at 200 percent. But in the loudly droning airplane, I couldn't crank up the sound enough to consistently hear the voices clearly through my headphones. I had no such problem with the Real movie.
Johnismad: These services are just too restrictive.
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caboosemoose: $4.95 for the priviledge of access to a movie with pitiful resolution for 24 hours.
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robgeurtsen: Yet this is promising for sure...
view full post >
I watched about two-thirds of the movie, then had to switch out my battery (the first one was fully charged when I started). My system cannot maintain standby without a battery, so I had to shut down and reboot. When I relaunched the movie, I simply fast forwarded to where I left off by dragging the slider in Windows Media Player's (Version 7.0) playback bar.
All in all, I would call my Movielink experience a success. Ramo was right about the battery lasting longer than with a DVD--I've played back DVDs on this system and they eat battery power at an incredible rate. I did, of course, give up premium image quality, though, and I'm amazed at services like Movielink and CinemaNow suggesting that whole families can watch these movies on larger PC screens.
Oh, and as promised, the Movielink software placed each film in my Recycle Bin automatically, exactly 24 hours after I first started viewing it. The Movielink Manager (the download manager), which now sits resident on my task bar, informed me of the event.
My recommendation? If you're about to take a long flight, you have a laptop with a good screen, good viewing angles and healthy battery life, and you're not annoyed that the clock starts ticking as soon as you authenticate, you might try a few Movielink movies. On the other hand, the view out the airplane window is pretty darn entertaining, and the batteries don't run out.
AI
