Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Friday I had 3731 page loads. I’ve been curious forever how many RSS hits I get, so I downloaded the logfile and ran:

grep -ic feed *.log

This returned a count of 589. What does this mean? About 16% or more of my traffic if from RSS feeds. More, if you count the fact that search engines hit more of my pages than the single RSS feed.

eXeem is a victim of its own success. The new p2p client from former bittorrent site Suprnova.org has gone under the ax, leaving a conspicuous warning message on all its beta clients:

Network status: We are experiencing problems with the network! We are working on the problem and will solve it soon.

This has been there for several days now. Meanwhile, an update on January 23rd reads:

eXeem’s network has been experiencing some problems, which is causing users to not be able to receive Nodes from the network. We are working on the bug and will if necessary release an update of the program.

With 120,460 downloads this week, it’s my guess that they just don’t have enough server power and bandwidth to support it right now, and need to work on decentralizing the application as much as possible. And, while a number of people have mentioned eXeem in their blogs, nobody really seems that excited about it!

Out of sheer curiousity, and some great bargains, I decided to try out the Movielink online video rental system. Since I could rent the old Pirates of the Caribbean and the new Unstoppable for only $0.48 after coupon #1 and deal #2, it seemed like a good time to try it out.

The first step was finding the right movies to watch. If you browse through movielink, you’ll see that they mostly carry 1-to-more month old “new releases” as well as a random smattering of older stuff, most of which is not that great. Their “Oscar” category is invaluable, since it actually presents some watchable movies. They do have several hundred titles–but most of them are B-rate.

Once you select your order, you are brought to this confirmation page:

This then takes you to their special download screen, where a custom ActiveX control takes over your computer and initiates the download:

The download manager is quite nice. It lists the movies you have bought, their download status, time to be able to begin watching, percent downloaded, and, if you start playing, how long until the viewing period expires. Downloading took about 30 minutes per movie on my cablemodem.

So now that we’ve rented and downloaded the movies, all we want to know is how do they look? And the answer is: not good. Encoded around 750kb/s each movie is only 500MB in size, meaning it’s about 35% smaller than the pirated XViD movies you can download online. This reduction in size leads to a noticable reduction in visual quality, as you can see in the following screen captures:

This is an image from Unstoppable of Wesley Snipes and his lover, whose hand is visible in the picture. Note the overall lack of definition and sharpness, and the muted colors. The whole movie has a drab, slow appearance, with none of DVD’s crisp edges and bright colors. Now look at:

This one, from Pirates of the Carribean, shows miscoloring of the reflective surfaces on the sword and the same lack of color or definition. Can you even tell it’s a sword?? These are unresized photos taken from watching the movie full-width in WMP 10.

Overall, the service is great, but the movie quality is poor. I have noticed that they offer EQ (Extended Quality) movies which probably compare better to XVID rips, but they cost $0.99 more, and have more restrictive pricing. And, there aren’t many of them. My take? If you want to watch movies, get Netflix. If you’re always online, have a tiny screen, and don’t mind poor quality and high prices, then maybe Movielink is for you.