My Mac does a pretty good job as a DVD watching station, which is pretty much all we used the TV for anyways (we haven’t had cable in years). I know about being able to download near-DVD quality movies, but it’s something I’ve never really gotten into. I guess it’s always been easier to just walk down the block and rent the DVD.
But, the other day I started downloading some TV episodes — you know, Law & Order, CSI, The West Wing, that sort of thing. Some observations:
Since I don’t have QuickTime Pro, I can’t use it to watch things fullscreen. Instead, I use VLC, which tends also to play a lot of files that QT might have trouble with. Also in my searches, I did as recommended by macosxhints and installed both DivX and 3ivx codecs, which pretty much solves all problem AVI files.
So Kate and I enjoyed a couple of TV episodes. In fact, Kate really liked it — she went to Costco halfway through The West Wing, so I just closed it, did some other stuff, and watched the rest of it with her when she came back. We’ll stick to rentals for movies, but TVβ¦
All this just after I told Greg that I never really bothered downloading movies :p
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