TechWag

In one of those about time kind of things, Seattle’s own Something Weird video, probably the best place on earth to find rare, hard to find, or out of print videos launched a new 5.99 download video on demand from their web site. For folks who love B-movies and other strange oddities from the film world, this is probably the best news of the whole day.

Something Weird has been playing trailers on their site for over a year now (if not longer), but the addition of the on demand download is a smart move in our increasingly digital download world. The cool part is that these are not DRM protected, meaning you can convert them to IPod, Zune, or other player. The native format is .mov, which can play in almost any free player (we used VLC), but can also be easily converted to other formats using a variety of free tools you can download. The movies are encoded at dimensions of 624 x 480 in their original aspect ratio, using the H264 codec. This works well on the Apple and Windows computer we tried these on. You also have 7 days and 10 attempts to download the file you bought, and they recommend making a backup of the file as well. They will let you put this on more than one computer at a time, and the lack of DRM is frankly refreshing.

The only real drawback is the download name is the catalog number, not the name of the movie, so the owner of the movie has to retitle the file manually. This is a neat addition to the something weird system given that it takes 3 to 5 weeks to get anything from them once you have made the order. This just adds a nice dimension to their service, and hopefully they will get more than the 150 titles on the system as soon as they can. This is something that crowd sourcing would work well for, having people convert and rip movies all day long for a free copy. Unfortunately though some of these files will end up on Bittorrent, but it is much better to simply buy the six dollar cheesy movie and have some fun with it.

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