"Free" ways to take movies etc on holidays?

Gloomendoom

We have a holiday place with no TV or internet available and I record films onto a BT TV box at home and take it with us.

Coupled with a small monitor, it doesn't take up much space.

bigmaz

If you have DVD's, you can rip them to a video file using a PC and then copy them onto a micro SD Card.

Chino

forgotmyname wrote: »

Why is it illegal to download from youtube?

Not illegal, but YouTube users agree not to. From the YouTube Terms of Service:

"5.1 YouTube hereby grants you permission to access and use the Service, subject to the following express conditions, and you agree that your failure to adhere to any of these conditions shall constitute a breach of these Terms on your part:
...
C.you agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Player, or such other means as YouTube may explicitly designate for this purpose;"

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

jamesd

Youtube download tools will typically access the content from the video playback page.

jamesd

gemmaj wrote: »

What do other people do?

What a lot of "other people do" is bit torrent. A wide range of illegally and legally available content. If you were inclined to the illegal side, a couple of days after a new film is released on DVD you'd find it available and downloadable in ten minutes or so. Kodi is mainly known for live streaming where it's very popular with relatively young people but it also can have download capability. Plugins are the key tool for its capabilities, since the base player lacks content services built in. While it's not legally correct, I'd find it quite understandable if someone who has something available via Now TV or Netflix but knew they wouldn't have an internet connection used one of the alternative routes for the content for a trip.

An approach used by some is tethering to a mobile phone's internet connection, or using a 3G/4G wifi or wired router. The data package cost may not be particularly cheap but since you're online you'd have your normal internet pay services available if you're getting a decent signal.

jamesd

If storage space is an issue, the Handbrake video tool is an easy way of making things smaller. If you have a recent Intel CPU you'll find that the video codec options available include the Intel QSV ones for h.265 (best) or h.264 (good). Double-click on a suitable preset on the right then adjust the quality slider to a lower quality until you get the size you need. For h.265 Leave the encoder preset at balanced and consider adding the extra option gop-ref-dist=16 or for older playback devices gop-ref-dist=8 to reduce the size. For DVD quality material you'd probably find it compresses in about as much time as the playing time so you can set up a batch to run overnight and just let it get on with it.

jamesd

gemmaj wrote: »

mainly camping (so no TV!) but I like taking a few movies and TV shows, for me and the kids. ... I do this with Amazon prime and a Fire tablet

If you want a bigger screen and have money to spend you might consider the Chuwi Windows tablet I describe here. The battery life is respectable and the ability to use the external power bank can help to extend that. Since it's a full Windows computer you can plug in an external hard drive and have BBC iPlayer download to it, just like it can on any Windows computer. You'd need a power option for the drive, though a 200GB micro-SD card in the tablet itself would hold plenty of material for a holiday and not need a power supply. The tablet can use the usual USB sticks as well using an OTG adapter costing a couple of Pounds, with no need for a power supply; a good option for non-BBC content. This tablet can't use a car charger but a power bank can use a USB car charger adapter and then pass that power on to the tablet, same for solar.

Plenty of laptop computers can do the same sort of job, that's just a tablet I happen to know fairly well.

Richard53

I use a program called Keepvid (or similar, not at home to check). I have used it to download programmes off BBC Iplayer (permanent MP4 copies without the 30-day limits) and it may well work with other sources too. Free and very easy to use.