So, you’ve discovered a great movie on this site, perhaps via the Movie Finder, and now you want to get your claws on it and shove it into the nearest DVD player.
Cyberpunk, as a genre, is with the exception of a few blockbusters somewhat of a specialist niche. Many works of cyberpunk can be quite difficult to get a hold of. This applies especially to older movies as well as comparatively low budget movies. These movies are often not stocked by retail movie stores because they would move small volume. They can sometimes be found in the discount bins, but this is a trial and error process that will seldom lead to success if you are searching for a specific movie. In this article we are going to make a few suggestions on how to get a hold of the more obscure works of cyberpunk.
Online retailers
Naturally, first recourse should always be to check if the movie is available on Amazon. Due to economies of scale and the sheer number of customers Amazon can stock movies that would be highly unprofitable for traditional brick and mortar retailer. To make your life easier, whenever we review a movie, we will add a link to the DVD on the Amazon website at the bottom of the Review. If we like a movie, we want to share it with as many of you as possible. Of course, in the name of full disclosure, this link is not entirely selfless as we do get a small trickle of affiliate revenue from every product sold on Amazon. Since we run this site as a hobby, we appreciate your support that helps cover our expenses.
If the product is not available on Amazon, there are a few other online retailers you might want to check out. Especially convenient are usually the local online retailers, often you can save significantly on shipping and handling costs.
Online bidding sites
Let’s be honest, we all love that feeling of holding a DVD in our own hands. It gives us a very primitive pleasure to look over our collection of DVDs that are accumulating on bookshelves and in cardboard boxes under our bunks. However, if we remain brutally honest. Most of these movies, we are never going to watch again. Now fortunately, there are a lot of other people out there who have come to the same realization and place their used and watched DVDs on bidding sites. The most famous of these is certainly E-bay, but there are a number of other plattforms that we have found useful over the years to get our hands on DVDs of cyberpunk films.
Digital download/rental sites
This is another option. While, the prehistoric thrill of owning something is dilluted somewhat through the lack of a physical product to stuff in your bookshelf, the convenience of these services are something to behold. At the very forefront is Itunes and there are a couple of other websites which will give you the possibility of downloading movies online. One of the more convenient that has recently come online is the new Amazon Prime service.
Pirating
We had a long brotherly discussion over whether to include this source of cyberpunk movies. We don’t necessarily condone downloading, but at the same time, condemming it also goes too far. Some movies are just really difficult to get a hold of and your only hope is to get a hold of a digital copy from somewhere. Also, depending on where you live, shipping might not be a possibility. So while we strongly encourage you to go out and find a way to get a hold of the cyberpunk works through one of the channels mentioned previously, here is a way to get them if all else fails. The easiest method is certainly to download them via torrent network. The way the technology works is that a central “tracker” coordinates who is downloading movies and who has already got a copy. Everyone who downloads then simultaniously uploads parts of the movie to other people who are still missing parts. Caution, uploading is pretty illegal in most jurisdictions, whereas the legality of downloading varies a bit more. At the end of the day, you are getting something for free that other people pay for, meaning you don’t contribute to the costs of making the movie, so it is pretty problematic.
To use torrent to get movies, you first have to get and install a download client such as Vuze or Bittorent. Next, you have to find a tracker. One of the largest places to get one of these is Isohunt. You will want to find a tracker that has as many seeds (Downloaders who have completed the download and are only sharing) and peers (People that are in the process of downloading the file and are just sharing parts of the movie). The more there are, the faster your download will likely be. Furthermore, if there is no complete copy of the entire file availlable, you will not be able to get a complete copy. After opening the tracker file in your bittorent client the download starts. Another word of caution, some of the files are encrypted with a password and require you to visit a website to do something. Never do this, this is always a scam. Sometimes people put the wrong file into the torrent database to mislead downloaders. These fakes can usually be identified by a comment that proclaims the file as a “fake”.
If the movie is not available as a torrent download, you might also consider trying to download it over IRC. This is comparatively more complicated but the general method of downloading files via IRC can be found under this link: Downloading via IRC.
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