I must admit, I got on the BitTorrent bandwagon late, but now I’m a firm believer in it. It’s an excellent way to get a multitude of different files, anything from full-length movies to computer applications. The legality of it is highly dubious, but there is a certain convenience factor that can’t be beat.
I jumped on the bandwagon this weekend, when I decided to start going through my taped episodes of 24. I was busy during the fall and winter and attempted to tape as many episodes I could. Unfortunately, I missed a few episodes early on and completely missed the last several hours of the day.
I went through my tapes quickly and got to my first gap in the season. A few clicks of the mouse later and I was downloading four consecutive episodes. It look several hours to complete the nearly 2 Gb file transfer. When I played the first episode, I was amazed. This wasn’t some cheap grab off a regular cable feed, someone had taken the time to produce a high-quality transfer from a HDTV feed. It wasn’t quite DVD quality, but it was sure close. Because it was the HDTV feed, the video came in widescreen format! I’ve never seen 24 in widescreen, so that was a nice bonus.
I can see why hard drives can be filled so quickly these days. Eight episodes of a TV show can take up 4 Gb. Add a couple of movies here and there, and a 250 Gb drive starts to look pretty tiny.
Though I am currently resisting the temptation, I’m interested in seeing how good the movies look off of BitTorrent.