High-Quality Video

The techniques I described in my previous post are quickly becoming outdated as they mostly use flash embedded videos. There are several problems with this method of delivery;

• they are usually fairly poor quality and sometimes the sound goes hugely out of sync
• depending on the website they may take hours to load which defeats the whole object of streaming
• they can only be watched once, unless you have a program to save them with (such as the VideoDownloader plugin for firefox) and even then it is not usually worth the effort

DivX, the company behind one of the most widely-used video compression techniques have created a website and embedded web DivX players called Stage6. This requires the users to upload videos in the DivX format, which has proved to be incredibly popular as the encoded videos are much, much smaller than raw footage so means that users can upload videos that are much higher quality, sometimes rivalling DVD quality. The stream is almost always instant, providing you have a good enough connection as DivX has obviously invested a lot of money to provide high bandwidth. Every video on the site has the option to be saved to the computer after streaming.

Streaming Video

there are many ways to watch copyrighted material on the internet, whether it is a tv show, movie or a music video you can find pretty much anything out there if you look hard enough and have enough time. One of the increasingly popular ways of distributing material is to 'stream' it from a website. Since the growth of ADSL, more and more people at home have the capabilities to stream video, the most popular website for this is YouTube.

YouTube are part of a multi-million pound company, so they have a lot to lose if they neglect their responsibilities as a video-hosting website. This means that it would be extremely difficult to find copyrighted material on there as they have numerous measures to prevent this, such as people to trawl forums and the website itself for any such material and only allowing users to upload 10 minute videos unless they have a special membership. Despite this, YouTube and other similar video hosting sites still have copyrighted videos on them, and always will.

How do these films get below the radar? The user often posts them under completely different names to what they actually are, or use a code for the title, for example if they were to post the 3rd episode from the 5th series of The Simpsons they may put "TS S05E03" or something similar, that way people searching YouTube for The Simpsons will never return the result they are looking for.

The user still has to have some way of finding these files though, so that is where 3rd party websites and forums start to appear, such as the recently deceased tv-links.co.uk. Moderators and contributers to these sites search the web and other forums for direct links to episodes and films, then simply list the links in their website. In theory this is taking advantage of a loophole in the system, as they are not actually hosting the videos, so are not liable. The same excuse that torrent websites use, which i will look at later on.