I’ll admit this; I’m way behind on the times. I know there are new ways of renting movies and many different ways of streaming both movies and some TV series. For the most part I haven’t kept up with any of that. I don’t watch a lot of TV these days except for special sporting events, and while I’m still working out of town I don’t get to the movies all that often.
Thus, for at least a little bit of entertainment, I had two choices. One, I could watch YouTube videos, which isn’t so bad except sometimes you can’t find what you want. Or I could send myself a bunch of DVDs, along with a DVD player, and occasionally watch a movie on the hotel TV.
The problem here is that I had nothing for work. I’m mainly doing research work and it’s tedious, sometimes boring. It’s not all that exciting; that’s why they call it work. Come some afternoons, after eating lunch, and it’s a chore staying away. Heck, sometimes I’m ready to fall out in the morning, since I have to get up early.
Then a month ago I discovered something called Flixster Disc to Digital. Actually, it was only a couple of weeks before that where I finally figured out what Flixster was, and it turns out I had an account for both them and Ultraviolet. Why do I mention Ultraviolet? Stay tuned…
Back to Disc to Digital. Flixster offers a program that you download to your computer and, if you have DVDs (who doesn’t have DVDs?), you can put them into your DVD drive and, if the movie shows up in their collection, you have the option of purchasing a digital copy for either $2, which is the standard version, or $5 for the HD version. If you have a Blu-ray player on your computer you can do it with those movies as well, but I don’t have one so there were some movies I couldn’t try.
It has lots of movies in its database, and I’m now up to 62 movies. However, I didn’t have to pay for all of them. How many of you have purchased the DVD packages that also include Blu-Ray and a digital copy? How many of you have redeemed them? Most of those movies can be redeemed through Ultraviolet, but if you have a Flixster account you can often redeem directly through them. Of course the caveat is that you’re still going to have to have accounts on both Flixster and Ultraviolet.
Of course nothing goes perfectly. Don’t even think about putting any movies in that are Disney movies; not gonna happen. And some Paramount movies will require you to not only go to their site to redeem the movies but you’ll have to watch them via a Paramount app that, unfortunately, stinks. I purchased the data copy of The Best Of Both Worlds, the final episode of season 3 and first episode of season 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was digitally remastered as a standalone movie, and I can only “try” to watch it on that stupid app; ugh.
Ah yes, I mentioned app. Even though, to convert movies to digital, you must use either a computer or laptop, you can watch them on any media that has wi-fi access (you can probably use your data plan also but you’ll burn through your monthly bandwidth pretty fast). Thus, I can “watch” these movies on my Nook while I’m at work, or on my smartphone (I’m not watching any movies on my smartphone; too small). Some of these movies allows you the opportunity to download them, which might work nicely if you’re on an airplane like I am a lot of the time, but you’d better have the capacity to store them all.
One last thing. Every once in a while they’ll have a movie but not a HD copy of it. Not a big deal to me but I like to buy HD whenever I can. It’s another way to get some use out of your DVDs, especially if the time to get the digital copy has expired, the cost isn’t prohibitive, and if you have the technology (which I know you do) you can watch them anywhere you go.
What do you think of something like this? I obviously think it’s great, but some of you might prefer things like Netflix or Hulu Plus. I haven’t found out if one can copy TV shows or series yet; that might be the next thing I try. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014 Mitch Mitchell