Blog Archives

Download HD Movie Trailers at HD-Trailers [Movies]

Posted on July 21, 2009
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If you’re a movie buff that just can’t get enough of the trailers, teasers, and clips from upcoming movies, HD-Trailers makes it easy to get your fill.

At HD-Trailers you can search and browse hundreds of movie trailers. You can download the videos in 480p/720p/1080p and even encoded for iPod and PS3. Each movie listed has at minimum a summary of the movie, cover art, and a trailer. The more popular movies have multiple trailers, teasers, and bonus clips for you to watch.

There is no registration required, you can jump in, browse, and download away. For more HD movie trailer action, check out previously reviewed Trailer Freaks which has an RSS feed to keep you up to date on the most current trailers.





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Build Your Own Outdoor Movie Theater [Weekend Project]

Posted on May 30, 2009
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There’s a certain allure to seeing a movie outside on a nice summer night, whether it’s the nostalgia of drive-in movies or seasonal ambience. Recreate the experience with your own outdoor theater.

Dave Banks, writing for Wired’s Geek Dad column, saw an outdoor theater system advertised in a catalog and immediately started dreaming of recreating the magic of those outdoor movie experiences. The price for the small projector, screen, and two speakers was a whopping $3,500. He shopped around online, priced out components individually, but ended up still priced over $2,000 to buy speakers, a comparable projector, and a collapsible screen. He wouldn’t be worth his Geek Dad moniker if he didn’t follow up his sticker shock with some creative DIY magic. The first order of business was to scrounge as many parts as he could:

My company had a projector that – with a little work – could be repurposed for an outdoor event (and it had nearly 1,000 more lumens than the piddly projector in the catalog). The speakers could be borrowed from an audiophile friend and I dusted off an old receiver to drive the sound. Finally, the dvd player was disconnected from the kitchen tv to contribute to the cause.

It wouldn’t be an outdoor theater without an enormous screen however. The cheapest commercial screen at the size he wanted was over a grand. With some creative use of pvc piping, buckets, rope and cement, he built his own, shown in the picture above. The most important part, the screen material, only cost him $25. The total cost for the materials was $123 with an additional $125 spent on getting grommets and reinforcing stitches put in by a local awning company. Dave notes in hindsight that if he hadn’t been racing towards a memorial day unveiling, he would have done the grommet and stitch work himself and cut the cost of the screen in half. For more pictures of the build and some tips and tricks he learned along the way, check out full article below.





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MovieStinger Reveals Which Movies Have Scenes After the Credits [Movies]

Posted on May 27, 2009
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“Oh man! Did you see that extra scene after the credits? It was great!” Ever heard those words in the lobby after you’d walked out before the credits finished rolling? MovieStinger helps avoid that sort of disappointment by maintaining a list of which movies contain additional footage after the credits.

When we featured Runpee, a website that suggests the best time to make a dash to the bathroom during a movie without worrying about missing a good scene, commenter razordu30 had this complaint:

I always thought it would be good to have a site that tells you whether you should stay after the credits. I’ve waited unnecessarily for many movies, and didn’t wait for others. =/

Visit MovieStinger for a solution to this guessing game to find out which movies have a "stinger"—an extra scene or additional footage—after the credits. You can decide whether it's worth to stick around based on information about what happens in those post-credits moments as well as ratings and comments by other users. Thanks, Andy.





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GuruLib Catalogs Your Media and More [Library]

Posted on May 11, 2009
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If you’re looking for a simple way to catalog your piles of movies, music, books, games, and software GuruLib is a handy tool for cataloging them all in the same place.

GuruLib is bursting with features in comparison to many cataloging websites. Not only can you set up a personal library for everything from your movies to your software and just about every media type in between but doing so is extremely easy. You can search by title, plug in the UPC/ISBN number, or even use your webcam or cellphone camera as a barcode scanner. There are wish lists and loan tracking tools to keep tabs on who has your stuff. GuruLib has widgets galore, you can set your library up as a cover-flow style screensaver, share your library with a Facebook plugin, create RSS feeds and integrate your Amazon habits into your library with a bookmarklet. Just as welcome as all the cool tools is the ease with which you can import and export data into GuruLib. If you have your own favored tool for tracking your stuff, let’s hear about it in the comments.





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Mobile Manager for Netflix Puts Your Movie Queue on Your Phone [Downloads]

Posted on April 16, 2009
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Windows Mobile only: There’s no shortage of Netflix applications for popular mobile platforms like the iPhone or Android, but Microsoft has just released a really nice looking Netflix Mobile application complete with streaming movie previews.

Apart from the preview feature—which does set Netflix Mobile apart from its other mobile counterparts—this app handles most of the common features you'd expect, like queue management, search, listings, and ratings. Mobile Netflix Mobile is a free download, Windows Mobile only—at least for a limited time, according to the download page. Thanks Louis!





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iPodME Converts Your Video to iPod Friendly Format [Downloads]

Posted on February 18, 2009
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Windows only: If you’re looking for a fire-and-forget video converter to help stock your iPod, iPodME is a dead simple and lightweight tool for bulk converting your video files.

iPodME is a completely portable standalone application—a GUI wrapper of the venerable ffmpeg for the curious among you. Operation is as simple as running the application, dragging and dropping a list of video files you want to convert onto it, and adjusting the basic video settings. You can select the video dimensions and the quality using the plain English metric provided–slow, quality or turbo, size for instance—to determine the conversion speed. If you dig into the options menu you can also tweak the process priority. The default for the application is to take advantage of idle cycles and back off when you're actually attempting to do work. Using the fast, quality setting and leaving it on the default of idle, it took approximately one hour to convert 20 episodes of Fraggle Rock into iPod-compatible MP4 files. An unexpected bonus in such a small package is support for SRT subtitle files, if you have them for your favorite foreign media you can embed them as you convert. If you’d like more fine tuned control over your video conversions, check out the candidates in the Hive Five Best Media Converters and the Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters to fulfill your tweaking needs.






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Hive Five Winner for Best Movie Cataloging Tool: Delicious Library [Hive Five Followup]

Posted on February 17, 2009
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Delicious Library—against the odds of being both commercial software and Mac only—took home the first place medal in this weekend's Hive Five Best Movie Cataloging Tools vote. Ease of use, beautiful interface, and the ability to catalog much more than just movies definitely weigh heavily in Delicious Library’s favor. Following closely behind Delicious Library was its Windows clone, Libra. A significant number of readers just aren’t happy with the available options, voting instead for Other and putting it solidly in third place. If you’re looking for a movie managing tool, read through the comments on both the call for contenders and the top tools in this weekend’s Hive Five to see what compromised the Other vote that so many readers logged.






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InstantWatcher is a Faster Interface to Netflix Streaming [Streaming Video]

Posted on February 16, 2009
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If you’re a frequent viewer of Netflix’s streaming fare, you’re probably numb to how inefficient the rental service’s browsing and search pages can be. InstantWatcher is a soothing balm of clean, fast movie browsing.

You’ll still need to be logged into your Netflix account to get much out of InstantWatcher, but once you’re in, you’ll find dozens of ways to filter and search films. Movies featuring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine? Just type in their names. Check which films won’t be available for streaming soon? Sure, just click one button.

Each page of results can be listed as straight-up titles, text with year, directors, and actors, a few lines of synopsis, or a picture-only box art view. Every result has a “Play” or “queue” link, and a left-hand sidebar offers related YouTube videos, Wikipedia and IMDB links for movie results, and nary an ad but on the right-hand side.

One of those web resources you truly hope the big enchilada it's working off of takes notice of—and soon. Free to use, no sign-up required.






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DVDSmith Movie Backup Copies Whole Discs or Just the Main Movie [Downloads]

Posted on February 11, 2009
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Windows only: DVDSmith Movie Backup is terrible for our headline style, since it does exactly what its name implies. It’s great, though, for anyone who simply wants to watch a DVD without the disc.

There are just five buttons to click on DVDSmith’s single window, and most times you’ll only need one. You can choose between “Full Disc,” which gets you menus, extras, and the full DVD-watching experience, or click “Main Movie” to grab the longest video and audio tracks. What you end up with on a “Full Disc” backup is a familiar VIDEO_TS folder, wherever you told the app to put it, and a bunch of .vob files, which can be played in most advanced media players like VLC. “Main Movie” does much the same, but with fewer .vob files turned out. DVDSmith is proud to announce on their site that their tool breaks through all the the major copyright protection schemes.

If you’re looking for a bit more control over your DVD backups, check out the free, cross-platform Handbrake, our own DVD Rip, or any of our Hive Five best DVD ripping tools. If you’re looking for a DVD backup tool an 8-year-old could grasp, though, DVDSmith Movie Backup is worth a click or two.






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