Support Your Local Library
The Queen has arrived! The video library of movies and TV shows is growing nicely over in the iTunes Store -- all in good time for summer and the start of vacation and maximum slacking season. I've purchased quite a few things from the Store, including most of this season's Veronica Mars. Even though the prices are reasonable, I've also been spending a lot of time on a site where the movies and music are even cheaper.
They're free, in fact.
The Internet Archive has been around for more than a decade, but since I got my video iPod, I find I've been visiting it way more often than I used to. The site -- a non-profit organization based in San Francisco -- collects all sorts of digitized audio, video and text for scholars, historians or anybody who wants to look. And being digital, you can even download some of the works.
For iPod enthusiasts, the fact that you can get lots of music in MP3 format or video in the MPEG-4 means you can take it with you (if the file has been bestowed with a "Download" link, that is). Granted, much of the content is older and in the public domain, but if you have any interest in film, music, or cultural history, it's easy to blow most of the afternoon roaming the virtual halls of the Internet archive. The usage rights vary and not everything is downloadable, but the site explains what you can do with each work you find.
The range of stuff in the Archive is great and I've found new things every time I've gone back. For example, there's Ludwig van Beethoven's lively 7th Symphony as performed by the BBC Philharmonic, or a Camper Van Beethoven concert recorded live at Indiana University in 1987. Many indie bands have songs here. There are collections of old-time radio shows like The Shadow and Dragnet and digitized recordings of those old 78 rpm records that were popular in the first half of the 20th century. And Deadheads probably already know about the massive section devoted to Grateful Dead concert recordings.
There's no Talladega Nights or Happy Feet in there, but movie buffs can find lots of classic stuff in the archive, everything from Frank Capra's horribly dated (but historically significant) World War II propaganda films to Bugs Bunny cartoons like "What's Opera, Doc?"
The quality of the digitized copy of some works can be a tad unreliable. I snagged an iPod-ready 256kbps MPEG-4 version of His Girl Friday, that great old newspaper comedy from 1940 with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It looked pretty good, but the sound was out of sync. (If you're just watching it on the iPod's small screen, though, it's not as noticeable, but purists will twitch.)
Some of the downloaded video files may also cause iTunes to complain that the file "cannot be played on this iPod" if you try to copy it over. I got that message a couple times, but was actually able to fix it within iTunes itself -- just select the video file, go to the Advanced menu and choose Convert Selection for iPod. It took several minutes of iTunes plodding along a slow-moving progress bar, but then a new version of the video appeared in my library and that one copied over just fine.
If you've got some spare time, the Internet Archive is a great place to browse and you never know what you might find on each visit. And after spending most of today downloading old movies, I think I've got enough to watch now until Veronica Mars returns from hiatus next week.
