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April 15, 2005
Runaway
Posted by rsexton at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2005
Zip.ca Report
I've been renting DVDs by mail through Zip.ca for a couple months now and I think it's a pretty good deal, especially if you have a DVD burner.
Although Netflix is a lot slicker, the Canadian imitation works alright. For the money I used to spend on late fees, I get more DVDs than I can even watch. As soon as I get a title, I rip it to my hard drive (takes about half an hour) and then mail it back to Zip so they can send out the next one and so on.
If it's a single-layer disc (not too many special features), I might burn it to DVD to make room on my hard drive. Otherwise, I don't think it's worth the trouble of re-encoding a movie, and all its special features, because it will tie up the computer for hours and hours. I've thought about dedicating one of my extra machines to video encoding though.
This past March I received 17 movies from Zip and watched about seven of them. With their monthly fee, that translates to $1.50 for each movie (or about $3.50 for just the ones I watched). Pretty good deal considering I never have to go to the video store or pay late fees.
But I shouldn't say "never." If you're renting a multi-disc thing or a series, like 6 Feet Under, you're probably better off going to the video store because Zip breaks up the discs and it would take moths to ensure that you got each disc in order because they ship them based on availability. And for the most popular "new releases," BitTorrent is probably better.
Although I still use all available options for acquiring and consuming movies, Zip.ca has definitely cut down the cost of my habit.
Posted by rsexton at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)