Well I just took the earlier comment as a bit of humour! There is perhaps two hours of video here, and I can't imagine anyone really trying to dub it. And with a simple dub you would lose all the original soundtracks. Its actually a tremendous compliment to think that my dubs would be worthy of the original actors' performances!

Personally I really dislike dubbed foreign films because you generally lose all the nuances of the original. I do like subtitled foreign films, but I have no intention of trying to subtitle these. Just think about the technical issues of trying to fit legible script on the lowest few lines of a 128 x 128 pixel screen! I believe we're better off with the unmodified originals.

No sooner had I changed all the links over to FileDen then KeepMyFile started to work again. I have now put the links to KeepMyFile back in the main post as alternates. At the rate downloads are happening I can see that the FileDen bandwidth is going to be used up in just a few days, so hopefully KeepMyFile will be a workable secondary method.

I would appreciate further feedback on the KeepMyFile links to see just how reliable they are going to be. And I still need to find a primary service that is both reliable and has more generous bandwidth...

I use win.rar which give you open, save, all you do is click save and put the file where you want it. The downloads work, just take 5 mins or less to download. I'm sure that beacuse everyone is downloading these great files.

I just checked all the alternate links every one worked except for Ben Hur and Casablanca. I got "cannot display website".

Wow, thank you so much for checking them all for me, pandadme! There was a really sneaky typo in the links for those two files, and I had to look at them quite a few times before I found the error. The links are now corrected and are working fine.

Yes, the downloads from KeepMyFile do take 5 minutes or less. I was actually very impressed by the service when I first tried it, and I do hope it works out in the long run.

Wooooow! Your project is much bigger and way more impressive than the tiny little SIMtv channel I am currently working on. What a wonderful list of movies and possibilities you got there! That must have been so much of work. I don't know where you find all the time and energy.

I rented 3 Hitchcock movies on DVD and I took extracts from them picture by picture. I got a tool that allows me to assemble the pictures into avi files, and I can control the number of /100 seconds for each picture. I'll add the sound separately, if I decide to add sound. I made a video with sound in the past and one without sound and it appears the sound lags down the game big time.

I am only done with capturing Psycho so far, I still got to extract images from The Birds, and I want to add a few Hitchcock speeches and some trailers for more movies, such as Rear Window, The Man That Knew Too Much, The Trouble With Harry, etc.

So now you see why I really can't be done in time lol. Even if compared to your project, it's like a peanut. It's interesting how you could add skill building possibilities to it. I wonder how you did that.

Thanks a lot for the help offer, I might PM you indeed.

Wow, your project is really much more technical than mine, working at a frame by frame level! I don't know where the cutoff is, but it seems to me that once a video gets much over 15 MB in size, the game's player starts to lose sound synchronization. You could break the video into 10 or 15 MB segments, but then the player will select their playback at random! Lastly the Sims themselves do not have the patience to watch a full length movie - I had converted the entire public domain "House on Haunted Hill" for them - which for them takes many game hours to watch. I would have needed a very sloppy Sim or a hack to prevent them from switching the video off, so that I could watch the whole movie!

The time and energy? Yes, it can be very disruptive to the rest of one's life - at times waking up at 3:30 in the morning - but it seems that when Eirian the muse is on one of her tirades, I must listen!

wont make it full length, just extracts Once everything is mixed to satisfaction, I'll reduce it until its a decent disk size for playing without lagging the game too much. I'll try to get the best extracts from each movie and remove anything unnecessary.

wow you got some courage. dont stop!

Oh thank you for the new links !!! Yesterday with many attemps I've managed to get only Ben Hur. Just one try for now and Gone with the Wind is already here. Good !!! :D
Oh by the way a special merci for M.Propre Sophie-David.

Your creativity skills deserve to win the contest, Sophie-David. Its really impressive the hard work and the originality of the idea.

Thank you nanisim, that is a very encouraging comment.

I'm glad you like M.Propre, it looked like a cute commercial. Its from a different time of course, when the man and woman are actually working together to clean house.

I am curious if the alternate links are working today. I hoping so because the bandwidth for the primary ones will likely be used up by the end of the week. I think I still need to find a better file host...

No - the alternates are not working at the moment, and there has been no reply to my enquiry at their forum.

I'm having a problem. I followed the instructions to the letter (I printed them out lol) and i did made backup folders and then after i made the tv folders and put my movies in the folders i started my game and i did not have any choice to pick the new tv channels. have i done anything wrong please help. thank you! I cant wait to get it working because it looks cool

P.S. I did look at both broadcast.ini folders and the tv satations are listed. just a heads up. :D

Just in case there is some confusion (but I don't think there is) Broadcast.ini is a file rather than a folder. This file needs to be placed in both C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Config\ and C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Latest EP\TSData\Res\UserData\Config\ as described above. UserName represents your own user name, and The Sims 2 Latest EP indicates your latest expansion pack.

I am guessing however that you have put Broadcast.ini in the proper places. The most likely problem that occurs to me is that the contents of SDTV_channels.zip have not been placed somewhere in your Downloads folders.

The symptoms you describe, of simply not seeing the choice of new channels in the channel selector, are identical to what happens when you are using say - the base game - and you do not see the Sports channel. Even though my modified Broadcast.ini specifies a Sports channel, you do not get the choice because the Sports channel simply does not exist unless you have installed University. In a similar way, I am guessing that my new channels do not show up in the channel selector because the game cannot locate them in a Downloads folder.

Please let me know if this is the solution.

I really didn't want to have any more frustration about my movie files, so I have just upgraded my personal domain account to handle both the file size and bandwidth of the classic movie trailers. I wish I had chosen this option sooner because it would have saved everyone a lot of bother. Thank you for your patience in any event.

While every service has its off moments, I have found my domain at Doteasy to be very reliable and until today completely free - provided I registered my domain with them (the domain registration fee is competitive, and in fact cheaper than I was paying with a Canadian registrar). There was never any visible advertising, and unless I said so, no one knew I was using a free server.

I do not anticipate any significant problems now that the files are relocated. If you do experience the occasional outage, I have included the FileDen links as an alternate. In two days of downloads from FileDen, two thirds of this month's 5 GB bandwidth has already been used up. But no one will want to use the FileDen links now because they are significantly slower. I just downloaded Ben Hur from each server as a test: it took 40 seconds from my domain, and 177 seconds from FileDen.

just wanted to ask a quick question. what are all the other files that you have included but did not say what they were for? E.g. the zip folder from rainy. I don't know if i was misunderstanding or not but the SDbella movies.zip is the movie files right? because i could only get your trailers to work. thank you so much for your help about the download folder. i really love my new way to "learn" lol!

Amazing work. Now my sims can watch actual movies in my movie theatre. Thanks.

Good advice, however the error comes up before I make any moves beyond loading the page! Then right-click only brings up the QuickTime options and no save options. Do I need to disable QuickTime and set up another browser?
Thanks!

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but no, you shouldn't need another browser. You need to right click on the link itself, the underlined movie name such as Ben Hur. Then if you are using Internet Explorer select "Save Target As..." from the popup menu. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, select "Save Link As..."

It must be a right click on the link though, because if instead you left click then you will load your default multimedia player which in your case is QuickTime. If you right click then it shouldn't matter what multimedia player you are using because it will never see the file.

Just to be sure, I just tried setting QuickTime to be my default player for AVI files. But it didn't matter, I was still able to right click on the link and select "Save Link As..."

Tech Note

I could have zipped each movie file, but I felt that it was only adding one more step for downloaders to have to do, and the file compression gained by zipping an AVI file just wasn't worth it. And also, I liked the idea that you could easily preview the file in your multimedia player if you wanted to, before installing it in the Sims 2. Typically if you do preview the file and then decide to go back and download from the link, your computer will not actually have to download the file again. The file will already be buffered in memory and the save will be instantaneous.

No, it is a very long post and I'm sorry to be confusing. The zip files you are talking about are not movies but recolours of base game paintings. If your install them in Downloads you will find the majority of them under the Lady in Red portrait, provided you also have CEP installed in your system.

Almost every one of these are the original movie posters, the printed advertising that the movie distributors used to publicize the movies before and during their release. They form the bulk of the huge list at the bottom of Post #1 above. I'm just going to quote from that post, because I don't think could put it any better:

First of all, this is a wonderful idea. Second, thank you so much for your step-by-step instructions on how to set this up in-game. I don't usually add such fiddly downloads to my games, but this was pretty irresistable to an old movie buff like me. Anyway, I followed your steps, and next this I know, my sims are watching Plan 9! )
I also love that they don't overwrite any other channels, and they work so well for skilling. Thank you, this is one of my all-time favorite mods.

Thank you, and I'm glad you like it chaotess.

I think that through this process I have become an old movie buff (I haven't noticed a Charisma increase yet though). It is pretty hard to resist some of these old films after watching the advertising for them several times, and likely I will have a few new DVD requests on my Christmas list! I like the creativity shown in some of the trailers (that in contemporary film have become so predictable) such as the clip for Citizen Kane.

I had anticipated that folks would have a lot of problems with the unavoidably fiddly installation, but there have been relatively few reports. I think it was a breakthrough for me when I realized that one Broadcast.ini file would work for everyone except those with other custom channels, because previous posts for new television channels were always bogged down by the apparent need for everyone to actually edit their own Broadcast.ini files. The majority of teething pains were of course with the movie file downloads, but I am delighted that the problem has now been resolved.

What a way to start! A movie that is so bad it is good! Of course I tried to include the very best of American cinema in this project, but I also threw in one or two doggies for fun. There were several good ones that I would like to have had, whose trailers were either unavailable or too poor in quality (such as A Streetcar Named Desire for "The Arts Channel").

I am doing a Halloween themed art conversion at the moment, as a change of pace, but I will be doing more classic movie channels.

Maybe I'm just a dummy, but I can't figure out where to download these files. when I click on the movie links it either opens a movie screen or opens a window to your website and doesn't do anything. Sorry to bug you.

No problem at all, cb, it is a complicated procedure and I appreciate you asking for clarification. You must right click on the link itself, then select Save Target As...

If you left click then your Windows movie player will try to play the movie instead of saving it. Please see the screen capture below. In this case I just right clicked on the Casablanca link and then the menu popped up. I then highlighted "Save Target As..." If I had clicked on "Save Target As...", then the "Save As" dialogue box would have been displayed, then I would be able to save the file in the appropriate movie folder.

Please let me know if this works for you.