Spalpeen

I’ve been “using” 4oD for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it might be wise to hit up a review of it. I took all these screenshots in Parallels running on my 2GHz MacBook. Everything seems to run smoothly, which is great considering I had been booting into Windows XP via bootcamp beforehand. To give you some perspective, it took me about 2 hours to get from a vanilla install of Windows XP to being able to run 4oD. I had to find a version of Windows Media Player (9, 10, and 11 all supposedly “work”) that didn’t require going through Microsoft’s crappy authorisation system — for some reason I couldn’t install Windows Media Player 10 or 11 because Microsoft thought my legit copy of Windows wasn’t legit — and then downloading and installing all sorts of things like .NET frameworks and new versions of Internet Explorer. UGH! Anyway, once I got it sorted, it all booted.

The first thing you’ll do is boot 4oD. This requires clicking on a little tab that appears to the right of the Windows taskbar.

Next, the main screen will appear, and you’ll be able to select an option to visit probably the most popular page: the free stuff. The whole system is basically just an Internet Explorer window without any of the taskbars you’d expect from a vanilla window. That means it boots up relatively quickly, but once it’s running you’ll have to deal with non-responsive links and other quirks from IE. It basically feels like one of those annoying websites based entirely on flash.

The download window is probably the second most popular page, which is where you wait for your downloads to finish, and then watch the ones you’ve already downloaded expire. Here you can see that I’ve already downloaded a few episodes. Once you’ve started watching an episode, it switches from expiring in 30 days to expiring in 2 days. You can’t pause the expiration. When you download an episode, there’s very little info on when the download will finish. The estimated download time seems to be based on how long a 2Mbps connection would take to download the file size of the episode in question. I have an 8Mbps connection, so it’s irrelevant for me. Usually a 300MB file would take about half an hour, but certainly not fast enough to press buy and then be watching the episode straight away. You can’t watch until the file finishes downloading.

Here’s what happens when you press play on an episode that had just finished downloading. You’ll notice that the expiration date immediately changes to the 4th Feb from the 2nd of March, which was the expiration date before I started watching.

 

Here’s a clearer shot of the pop-up that appears when you press play. Pretty standard stuff right? You have three size choices — no dynamic resizing here folks.

Here’s a screenshot of the full screen quality. Click on the thumbnail for a full resolution screen. It looks OK here, but when it’s full screen you can definitely see some pixelation. It’s basically somewhere between the quality of VHS and digital TV. It’s also really crap with any kind of movement. I’d never purchase a movie from the service with quality this crap.

Here’s a shot of the weekly schedule (click for larger screenshot). All the episodes in dark grey aren’t downloadable. That sucks because I’d love to be able to automatically download Channel 4 News each day in case I missed it.

 

Instead of using 4oD, I can easily use a torrent client like xTorrent to download all the episodes of stuff that’s on 4oD. It takes me 3 seconds from booting the program, to pressing download, and then about half an hour to download the file. That’s without owning a copy of Windows, booting into said operating system, and then dealing with installing the program, dealing with the crappy program itself, and then dealing with the crappy DRM. The only problem is the questionable legality, but if I’ve already watched both episodes of Skins on TV (and I have), then I don’t see a problem.

In summary, 4oD sucks, but I’ll still use it for the content. Even if I will probably still use torrent software…