site  contact  subhomenews

Downloading old B-class Sci-Fi movies for next hiking trip

February 08, 2021 — BarryK

Continuing to have fun planning for the next hiking trip. Evenings at a campsite can drag on a bit, and it is good to have some entertainment. An ebook or movie on phone or tablet is just the thing.

So, looked online for old sci-fi or horror movies, those ones that are so badly made, that they are great for light-hearted entertainment.

Found this site:

https://archive.org/details/SciFi_Horror

Have downloaded a few. Only problem is, they are very low resolution. In the case of "Voyage to the planet of prehistoric women", there is a .ogg file, ‘VoyagetothePlanetofPrehistoricWomen.ogg’, which is about 2.0GB, but still, the movie is only 720x480 pixels (480p).

I would prefer 720p, as I might be taking a tablet with 1280x800 screen.

Anyone know anywhere else those old movies can be downloaded for free?

EDIT:
Just discovered, youtube.com has a lot of full-length movies, with ads. Some classical, don't know about sci-fi, but some are documentary, like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyMkD6pUWlg

...can download 720p, 1 hour and 34 minutes, looks great. Oh yes there are sci-fi movies, like this, 1 hour and 39 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=papeLtBvaTE

...great!

EDIT 2021-02-10:
Here is a list of 1950s sci-fi movies on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZbz3OJ5NHVbbvleXPKc0NSEWRzPGCauU

I did this to create a file with the individual URLs:

PL=https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZbz3OJ5NHVbbvleXPKc0NSEWRzPGCauU
youtube-dl -j --flat-playlist "${PL}" | grep -o '"title": .*"url": "[^,]*' | \
 sed -e 's%"url": "%https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%' | sed -e 's%^"title": %%' \
 -e 's%"$%%' > movie-list.txt

Some of those are deleted, leaving 133 movies. It is possible to download these without the advertising, via applications or online sites, however, the ads are how youtube stays in business.  

Tags: light