Making Sense of Movie Downloading
– that would be a separate article in itself!
Clearly when a movie is downloaded you are not downloading an actual DVD! So when you download a movie what do you actually download? It is quite simply a computer file – but of course they come in many types! Here are the main bits of movie file jargon you may come across.
MPEG-4: this is a standard for a file for video and audio, compiled by the “Moving Picture Experts Group” (hence MPEG) and it is their 4th version of the standard. So you can now download movies in MPEG-4 format – but this can take time as the files are so large!
DivX: developed by DivXNetworks, this is a file that enables fast movie downloads without losing any picture quality – and DivX is also based on the MPEG-4 video file standard that we mentioned above.
Codec: although it sounds mysterious, this is a piece of software
