We do not have cable television at the house so we watch our shows via the internet. The problem with CBS, NBC, ABC, CW, SyFy, and Fox offerings is that they post episodes a week after their original air time. However,
www.sidereel.com is an amazing resource to watch new and vintage television; even programs you cant find without paying for premium services from HBO, Showtime, and other pay providers.
To keep the pop-ups, false links, and embedded advertisements to a minimum, we use and highly recommend the following method.
1) Install Google Chrome from
www.google.com/chrome (you dont need to make it your default if you dont want)
2) Go to chrome://chrome/extensions/ in your newly installed Chrome browser and click on the Get more extensions link. Search for and install the AdBlock extension. The one with the red hand in the stop sign is the one you want. After installing it will ask you how much you want to donate to the author. Donate if you want, or slide the bar to 0 and close the tab to use it for free.
3) You should already have Flash, but if not it is built in to Chrome. I think some of the sites want Java too.
www.java.com
4) Install the Divx plugin from
http://www.divx.com/en/software/divx-plus/web-player and the Xvid plugin from
http://www.xvid.org/ - not required, but they will make more links available to watch.
5) Go to
www.sidereel.com and search for the shows you want to watch. Each show will have several links for each episode. Keep in mind that the older the show, the greater probability of dead links. Also, some really hot shows from HBO or other pay services are sometimes hard to find as the hosting sites are forced to remove the videos. *New episodes are often sluggish as people worldwide may be trying to watch too, but you can always let the links cache or buffer for a while if they wont play smoothly. Some links will limit the amount you can watch from them, but you will quickly learn to skirt those. Some links will load super-fast. Some will be better quality than others.
6) If you want to watch movies, check out
www.solarmovie.com and
www.ineedpopcorn.com. I prefer the former. Most new links are camera captures out of theaters, but DVD and even HD quality releases are usually posted within a few weeks. It isnt only new movies that are available; we recently watched a Francis the Talking Mule movie via an online stream.
7) Warning: The following process constitutes piracy and is illegal; let your conscience be your guide. Chrome has several plugins / extensions available that allow you to actually capture the video so you can save your favorite TV show or movie to your hard drive. I am testing FVD Video Downloader, but usually I use an external program from
http://www.videodownloadtoolbar.com/ with pretty good results.
*We like to watch The Mentalist. A few weeks ago we were caught up with the series and sitting there lamenting not having cable to watch the episode that was airing that night on CBS. I fired up sidereel.com and we were able to watch THAT NIGHTS episode captured off the east coast before it even aired in our time zone.
Questions? Just ask!