Can you buy *full* Blu-Ray movies online and download them from a site?

CharlesHaughey

I'm talking about a full size 1080P, which contains around 14GB for every hour of film. I don't like to order from amazon as the Blu-Ray cases build up pretty quickly, plus it is these days around €14-€15 euro for a Blu-Ray movies that is 1-2 years out, which is still a bit. Zuze (SP) on the Xbox 360 only streams 1080P movies that are seriously downgraded in quality, all their files are 15 GB's and under.

I am thinking, as it could well be cheaper, if there it a site online where you can pay for full Blu-Ray movies (legitimately) and download to your hard-drive?

Sad Professor

No. The only way to buy Blu-ray is to, uh, buy Blu-ray. Most legal downloading services only offer a compressed 720p version of the film.

Tbh I'm not sure why you'd want this anyway. If you are paying for it you are better off having the film on disc. A full legal Blu-ray download would take up a lot of space. And if your hard drive fails (as they are prone to do) you lose everything. You'd have to spend a lot of money on hard disks to ensure you had everything sufficiently backed up. This is one of the reasons why I think digital downloading to buy is never really going to take off and is just a stepping stone to subscription streaming services.

CharlesHaughey

Sad Professor wrote: »

No. The only way to buy Blu-ray is to, uh, buy Blu-ray. Most legal downloading services only offer a compressed 720p version of the film.

Tbh I'm not sure why you'd want this anyway. If you are paying for it you are better off having the film on disc. A full legal Blu-ray download would take up a lot of space. And if your hard drive fails (as they are prone to do) you lose everything. You'd have to spend a lot of money on hard disks to ensure you had everything sufficiently backed up. This is one of the reasons why I think digital downloading to buy is never really going to take off and is just a stepping stone to subscription streaming services.

But, uh, Blu-Ray covers takes up loads of space. A full 2.5 hour Blu-Ray in MKV is only 28GB big, which is not an awful lot. I have a 2TB hard drive, if I have 50 movies on the hard drive the Blu-Rays are in the hard drive, not taking up an entire shelf.

Tipsy McSwagger

CharlesHaughey wrote: »

But, uh, Blu-Ray covers takes up loads of space. A full 2.5 hour Blu-Ray in MKV is only 28GB big, which is not an awful lot. I have a 2TB hard drive, if I have 50 movies on the hard drive the Blu-Rays are in the hard drive, not taking up an entire shelf.

I have around 80 blu rays and 7 box sets and they take up little space compared to DVDs especially the american ones which are very thin. I have never downloaded a blu ray.

jester77

Sad Professor wrote: »

No. The only way to buy Blu-ray is to, uh, buy Blu-ray. Most legal downloading services only offer a compressed 720p version of the film.

Tbh I'm not sure why you'd want this anyway. If you are paying for it you are better off having the film on disc. A full legal Blu-ray download would take up a lot of space. And if your hard drive fails (as they are prone to do) you lose everything. You'd have to spend a lot of money on hard disks to ensure you had everything sufficiently backed up. This is one of the reasons why I think digital downloading to buy is never really going to take off and is just a stepping stone to subscription streaming services.

I've a few NAS servers at home that store my content. I've had a few discs fail, just replaced them and the raid arrays were rebuilt. I would also love to have the opportunity to download full HD movies. A good site should allow you to re-download in the event of losing the file. Bandwidth is good these days and a full movies would only take 2 or 3 hours to download.

I had a good few TV series sitting on a shelf for over a year and lazy as I am, I couldn't be arsed getting up to stick them in the DVD player. It wasn't until one weekend I decided to have a massive ripping session and stick everything on the NAS, that I started to watch them. I know it's only a matter of getting up, going across the room, locating disc, and putting it into the player. But there is just something so easy about sitting on the couch, scrolling through your HTPC and selecting what you want to watch.

Sad Professor

If the physical space that BR cases take up bother you, you could always dump the cases (or throw them in a box in the attic) and put all the Blu-rays in a disc holder. I used to do this with my music CDs years ago. Of course, if you dump the cases then it's difficult to sell them on later, but it's not like you can sell digital downloads anyway.

I completely agree about the convience of digital downloads, but storage is a problem. If one hard disk fails (2TB HDDs are notoriously unreliable btw) then you are going to lose a lot more than one file. Can anyone tell me of a legal downloading service that will happily let you download 2TBs of data all over again? Most people don't even backup their computer, never mind use RAID. With the advent of cloud computing this will be less of a problem in the future, but this will lend itself more to renting than buying to own as you will have to pay a monthly subscription.

I don't mean to dismiss the advantages of being able to download a full 1080p Blu-ray quality equivalent of a movie, but I really think that if you want to buy a film to own that you are better off getting the Blu-ray. It's cheaper, it has more extras, it's more reliable, you can lend it to friends and sell/trade it when you are finished, and if they are taking up too much space, rip them and throw the cases/discs in the attic or somewhere. The studios aren't giving much incentive to buy digital downloads.

As an aside, does anyone have a list of legal downloading services that are available in Ireland? There can't be more than a handful.

Arcee

Sad Professor wrote: »

As an aside, does anyone have a list of legal downloading services that are available in Ireland? There can't be more than a handful.

Just www.volta.ie that I know of. It's a new (completely legal!) streaming and download site...

bnt

HD movie files are huge and present problems with downloading, backup etc., but I said the same things about DVD-quality files only a few years ago. It's only a matter of time before they are the new "standard". For storage I'd be looking at a Drobo or something similar if I had the budget or the bandwidth for any of this!