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Netflix Lets Users Watch Videos Offline -- No DVDs Required

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-DVDs dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Remember when you could watch Netflix videos without an internet connection? With something called "DVDs"?

Well, now you can again, and you don't even need those circular shiny things. Netflix has finally made movies and TV shows available to download, so you can watch them offline, whenever you want, wherever you are.

In IT Blogwatch, we can't decide what to binge watch first.

So what exactly is going on? Laura Roman has the background:

On Wednesday, Netflix announced and implemented...the ability to download TV and movie titles on mobile devices.
...
At no extra cost...Netflix subscribers will now be able to save select content to their iOS or Android devices, then watch on the go without the need for an internet connection. Say goodbye to...in-flight movies, Netflix is now airplane-mode compatible.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:00PM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:00PM (#436505)

    A one hour TV show sans-commercials ends up as a 350mb download on pirate pay. It's not 720p, but you're not watching it in a home theater, either.

    I'd definitely do this and download 10 episodes at 3.5GB onto a tablet (for plane/car trips). It's not like I use the space for much of anything else.

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  • (Score: 2) by Jiro on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:51PM

    by Jiro (3176) on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:51PM (#436571)

    With H265 a one hour show at 720p is normally below 350MB. Of course, H265 is patented out the wazoo, but if you're pirating anyway, this isn't going to matter.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:09PM (#436591)

    That's about 4-5 years out of date; for a long time, scene releases were sized to fit neatly on CD-Rs, or for some standards, DVD-Rs, so you could fit 2x 350MB on a 700MB CD-R; 720p releases at that time were generally 1.1 GB to fit 4x in a single-layer DVD-R, or for cable shows (full hour, no ads) at 1.47GB for 3x.

    Today, that sort of fixed-size rule only applies to SD XviD releases, which aren't quite dead yet, but aren't really relevant anymore. More recent x264 rules (since 2011-2012) specify constant-quality encoding, so a 1-hour show would be released in SD with a file size anywhere from 200 to 400 MB depending on content, with an average of about 270MB. The corresponding 720p release would range from about 700 MB to 1.5GB, with an average about 850MB.

    I don't presently mess around with x265, but those releases are even smaller for the same quality.