People can encode the movies however they feel though so just because it's HD doesn't mean it has to stay that way when it's put up on the net.If we're seeing more and more HD movies to download then it means more and more people are interested in them. It's all about the illegal supply and demand.

sure but a true blu ray disk is 50Gigs. How long do you think it would take to torrent that without having a usenet acct. lol

it's also kind of the evolution of filesharing. when music started to be shared on napster everyone had dialup and to get a single song took 30 minutes. now it takes just a few seconds. when the first movies started to become popular on kazaa and edonkey a 700mb movie could take over a day to download. now with torrents they can be done in an hour or two from a public site or a few minutes from a private site. now with HD rips, yeah, you'll take forever, but as everyone's connections get faster that time will decrease accordingly.

Correction. Some of us were Eastlink Beta Testers here.

Or good old mpower before MTT became Aliant

The disk can handle 50gb however most movies (excluding the extras) end up being around 25gb. Even still, you can get re-encoded files that drop that file size down to 12gb.

I find 8gb 720p files to be the perfect balance of quality, file size and time to "purchase".

Well I am going to be doing mostly AVI files and the odd blu ray "purchased" download.

I have a samsung Blu ray player for those I just want to keep an actual legal copy of. Most blu ray's allow a single rip with a key code to your HDD.

I am looking forward to getting the htpc built and online.

Some more food for thought is figuring out how many hard drives you'll want in your HTPC. I already have mine maxed out, so now I'm looking at building a NAS.

I thought about that one already. I am going to load up several on a 250 or 320Gig but also have some on drives in my main gaming rig that I can stream to the htpc.

For a little while that would work just fine. I know alot of people go nuts with movies but I am not that type really. Have lots on hand ( well lots is a relative term but for me means less than most would consider) and I can delete some when I dont wannem anymore. If space eventually becomes an issue and it may, hdd's are cheaper all the time so it would pay to wait.

Had to give Phonix credit for pointing out usenet. I had never used it but decided to take the plunge. Paid $15 for a months unlimited service with 20 connections. So far in the 16 hours I have had it running i have downloaded over 100gb of data which is crazy. constant 1800kb/s all the time on an eastlink connection. If you download and have not tried this DO IT! it is so worth the $15. My samsung bluray player with media streaming from my pc is loving it. Its been a while since something has got me all fired up with the computer. lol its like when high speed came out.

Where does one go to sign up for a Usenet account?

There was cable internet here in 1997? It was just starting to get rolled out in Toronto in 1998.

1997... no... but I was in grade 10 (1998/1999) when we got our beta line for Eastlink cable and it was glorious. I suppose I did have Napster before that though since I remember being shocked at having a song in under 10 seconds, and for that I would have had to have some experience getting one on dial-up... so thanks Steve-O for ruining my bragging rights.

Well I say its easier to dl the movies. when you get 2 mb/s dl speed it don't take long.. Netload shows me in the last year dl'n 5 TB's so... I think if I thought long enough it would work out to way over $4000 of movies shows and documentaries.