Had reinstalled XP after wiping slick a drive and found I'd wiped my DVD encoder. That stunk and finding the DVD player/decoder buried in one of the support discs for the laptop wasn't my idea of fun. A little Googling later brought up the VLC Media Player, an open source project that does right well. After IM'ing that link to a few schmoes, I got passed this URL which lists a ton of bootlegs of recent movies (no download links; I suppose this serves to gives you what you need to search for to grab a certain version, as well as rating the quality of each version).

No no, this is not to say I've suddenly become an Irish Pirate ("BLARNEY!!!!!!!!"), but it did occur to me that there's not really a Furthurnet equivalent when it comes to movies. There are a number of main stream games that have been open sourced and usually a pretty good homebrew selection for old gaming consoles, and heavens knows there are tons of open software applications that are essentially as good as commercial counterparts. With the aforementioned Furthur, there are gigs and gigs of great, near commercial-quality shows/music tracks from popular, contemporary bands to use with your warez player -- legally.

But I haven't stumbled over the "open/free" movie community, and I've the suspicion that, when I do, it won't quite be the same sort of high quality I've come to suspect with other free movements.

Blah blah blah.