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There are a bunch of illegitimate pay-downloading sites on the Internet. The premise is simple: the website promises oodles of movies, games, music to download if you pay a certain fee.

I was able to get into the member’s area of two of these sites without paying, to do a bit of recon [thanks MattZab]. Inside these sites you will find a bunch of links to resources that were already free to begin with, such as open-source software, free online radio sites, etc. No mention of the “Thousands of movies”, “Millions of MP3s”, “Applications” or any such downloads. At most some of these sites will have links to other torrent tracker sites.

There was also a phone number for customer service. So I decided to call it up!

Download Phone Conversation

Its funny how time flies. I just got an email informing me that my Freewebs account was about to expire. Because its always handy to maintain 100MB of external storage, I decided to login and void the potential of losing my account.

I found pictures/screenshots that I had stored there from 2 years ago. There was one of my first sigs ever on NX. An Agenda cover I had made for my high school in my last year there. Screenshots of my desktop w/ a samurize config. The config wasn’t half bad; pretty decent custom desktop w/ theme. It feels like I was on that depiction of my computer a few months ago… but its been 2 years.

Time flies.

The EYNTO DVD is complete. It has a resolution of 720×480 and is compatible with home DVD players. It also contains a director’s commentary, and has an index to access each chapter quickly. I began putting it all together today:

Download Cover Art

This is what the menu looks like once you start the DVD:

The cost for me to ship the DVD to you $3 + Shipping. I am doubtful that this $3 will cover the fees required to produce each unit (cost of DVD-R, DVD Case, Printable Sticker for Disc, Paper Insert, Printer Ink), but at the same time I can’t profit from this because of the copyright issues.

You can also download the ISO via a torrent file.

EliteTorrents is down, and are displaying the following message on their site:

THIS SITE HAS BEEN PERMANENTLY SHUT DOWN BY THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION AND U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT

Individuals involved in the operation and use of the Elite Torrents network are under investigation for criminal copyright infringement

It is unlawful to reproduce or distribute copyrighted material, such as movies, music, software or games, without authorization – even when done for free over the Internet. Individuals who willfully distribute or download copyrighted material risk criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 2319. First-time offenders convicted of criminal felony copyright laws will face up to five years in federal prison, restitution, forfeiture and a fine.

As usual I find it amusing when the sentence for killing an individual (manslaughter) is lighter than the maximum sentence for someone sharing music/movies. I guess that’s what you get when the music/movie industry pays the person in charge of US copyright laws $200,000.

The Ultra-High Quality WMV idea worked for the EYNTO show. Am now transencoding to XViD; using RAD Video Tools (free!). Those tools also saved me when I found out that the audio for the movie files taken by my digital camera were at the wrong rate, permitting me to transencode to AVI files w/o this audio hurdle.

As far as I’m aware, this is the only program that can convert WMV to XViD as well.

Update: Using VirtualDubMod to process the 2nd processing render for the XViD, as RAD can’t recognize its non-standard (maligned) output of the first. At least I can use it now, as the files are no longer unrecognizeable WMVs, but AVIs. Next up: rendering into MPG for DVD output.