Over a million downloadable movies, songs, and books from the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, a non-profit online library dedicated to the permanent preservation of information in digital form, now offers over a million (legal!) downloadable movies, audio books, feature films (comedy, film noir, sci-ti, horror, silent filems, and more), animations, movie trailers, old radio shows, live music concerts (featuring artists like John Mayer, the Grateful Dead and the Smashing Pumpkins), and books. This makes lots of source footage available to you not just to watch, read, or listen to for your own entertainment, but also to use as part of the media projects you work on here in the Vitale Digital Media Lab.

Using Bit Torrent as the distribution method allows everyone to share the wealth, and keeps bandwidth costs down for the ever-expanding Internet Archive.  We don’t allow bit torrent downloads in the library, but you can download the free software onto your own computer and then download the movies of your choice from the Internet Archive.  If you need help extracting a clip or editing the content, just bring the files in and we’ll be glad to show you the next steps.

If you’re not familiar with what Bit Torrent is or how it works, check out this handy dandy guide from Life Hacker: http://lifehacker.com/285489/a-beginners-guide-to-bittorrent.

Check out the recent Internet Archive blog post at http://blog.archive.org/2012/08/07/over-1000000-torrents-of-downloadable-books-music-and-movies/ for more details.