Where can I download video easily?

August 11, 2007 8:04 PM

I've just bought a portable media player and want to fill it with video. I'm loving Stage6 - click the link and it quickly downloads a high quality divx file. Anything else out there as easy to use and reliable?

Stage6 has a great range of British TV but I also want to get hold of American television. I know this is in a gray legal area but I am prepared to pay money for a good service.

[I'm not interested in bit-torrent as it doesn't work for me with my service provider].

posted by meech to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

If you're prepared to pay money, try the iTunes Music Store, though playback will depend on which portable media player you own (it will work with iPods)
posted by mathowie at 8:57 PM on August 11, 2007

You can download Youtube videos as well.
posted by __ at 9:00 PM on August 11, 2007

Google Video has download links with most stuff, and there are hours of good old stuff.
posted by mathowie at 9:05 PM on August 11, 2007

blink-left just sent me this link
posted by hortense at 9:39 PM on August 11, 2007

I'm not sure if you can download from it, but I LOVE this site:

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/
posted by willmize at 2:54 AM on August 12, 2007

On the Google Video recommendation: I regularly get dropped connections at about the 10% downloaded mark, and GV doesn't appear to support resuming. It does support downloading from X seconds in if you fool about with the download URL, and I've written a primitive brute-force file splicer that lets me stitch together a mostly workable AVI from all the resulting partial broken downloads, but this is a pain. Does anybody else get regularly broken downloads from GV, and if so, what's your workaround?
posted by flabdablet at 6:28 AM on August 12, 2007

DVD rental + Mediafork would work really well for this.
posted by mzurer at 8:01 AM on August 12, 2007

The tv-links.co.uk site is nice, but it's mainly a Stage6 scrape, so. Peekvid maybe?
posted by carsonb at 8:51 AM on August 12, 2007

how do you download the stage6 files? i can view them but dont know how to capture them??
posted by edtut at 11:52 PM on August 12, 2007

I like tv-links , but the content is embeded in pop-ups, so downloading isn't always an option. alluc takes you to the page on the content provider, which makes for easier downloading. I find these two to be pretty complementary in terms of content so I use both.

To download from stage6: beside the big play button in the middle of the video screen is a down arrow, that is the download button.
posted by dr. moot at 12:18 PM on August 13, 2007