Looking for Faster/Easier way to Preview and Download Movies from Forums (email, screen)

[JacksonPanther]

I frequent a couple of forums that offer short movies or videos for download. Every video also has a pic file as well, with highlights to help you decide if you want to download the full video.

It gets annoying and slow when you go to the forum where there may be 100 new forum entries, and each entry might have one video and pic, or maybe a couple dozens videos and pics. Clicking through all of this is impossible, and I feel like I am missing many good films.

I was wondering if the magic of the Internets had invented something to facilitate this process? Perhaps something that walks the forum, downloads all the pics, and makes them available for easy browsing and selection of only desired videos?

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

I was wondering if the magic of the Internets had invented something to facilitate this process? Perhaps something that walks the forum, downloads all the pics, and makes them available for easy browsing and selection of only desired videos?

There is such a thing however as a very active forum owner I can tell you if it was my forum you'd quickly find yourself on the other side of a firewall staring at a blank screen. This is all done through detection of such activity. This is common activity for what they a scaper which is not a usual user and just there to steal your content, harvest email addresses etc.

What you might want to do is take your suggestion to the forum owner. I'm guessing the type of forum and if it's one of them I would also guess they could care less about the user hence the reason they are using a forum in the first place, it's just easy to setup.......

[JacksonPanther]

Originally Posted by thecoalman

There is such a thing however as a very active forum owner I can tell you if it was my forum you'd quickly find yourself on the other side of a firewall staring at a blank screen. This is all done through detection of such activity. This is common activity for what they a scaper which is not a usual user and just there to steal your content, harvest email addresses etc.

What you might want to do is take your suggestion to the forum owner. I'm guessing the type of forum and if it's one of them I would also guess they could care less about the user hence the reason they are using a forum in the first place, it's just easy to setup.......

Stealing forum content really isn't my intent. I'm serious about looking for a faster way to view the previews and determine what I want, not a way to download everything.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

Stealing forum content really isn't my intent.

I didn't say it was or mean to imply that but what you want to do requires a lot of resources. If everyone viewing that site did what you wanted to do the server would get overloaded. The site owner only has X amount of resources and you would be using a lot of them.

I'm serious about looking for a faster way to view the previews and determine what I want, not a way to download everything.

Unless the site owner has set this up there is no way for you to do that without downloading everything except for mayby the videos.

It just occured to me but did you look to see if they have RSS feeds? Assuming they include the image in the feed that would be the best to provide this service to users.