Last week, while I was off working like a madman (and getting exposed to every germ in L.A. apparently, as I’m still sick) Smallville ran over by a half hour during its season finale. As I don’t have a DVR that’s capable of recording two shows at once, this resulted in me missing not one, but two episodes of Alias. I had pretty much accepted that and was planning on just picking up with this week’s season finale, when it suddenly occurred to me that this crazy Internet could probably help me obtain those episodes.


So I did some hunting around (with the help of some friends), and sure enough, I was able to find BitTorrents for the two episodes I missed. I downloaded them, and while they’re not the “HD” quality they claim to be (sorry l33t h@x0rz, but unless it’s 1920×1080 or 1280×720 it’s not HD), they are pretty decent quality movies in XviD format.


Now, while my TiVo does support a lot of different formats for various things, it’s limited to still pictures and music files. It can’t play back DivX files or anything like that, so I needed to burn these to DVD first. So I fired up iDVD, dropped the first episode into a project, burned it to a DVD-RW (since I don’t really need to keep this after I’ve watched it), and then repeated the same process for the second one. And what do you know, it worked perfectly. In the old days (pre-iLife ‘05), burning these would have taken an eternity, and required me to split the movies up into smaller chunks just so I could get it all to work. But happily that’s all in the past, thanks to the latest versions of iMovie and iDVD.


The discs play in my DVD player/TiVo just fine (as anything burned with iDVD does), and while they’re not quite as high quality as they would be had I TiVoed it, they are about the same quality as a TiVo on its high quality setting (I always use “best” unless I’m burning something to DVD). And as an added plus, someone has been kind enough to delete the commercials from these in advance.


So the question is raised: did I steal these? I would have taped them had my TiVo not needed to record Smallville instead, so is this any different? Is it any different if I had asked someone to record it for me and borrowed a tape/DVD of the show? I would have fast forwarded through the commercials even if they hadn’t been edited out, so does that make it wrong? I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I really don’t. I don’t even have an opinion on the matter. Had I been able to buy those episodes on-demand in HD for a very small price, I might have done that, but it’s tough to say. I might pay $5 for the pair, but no more than that, since I’ll only watch them once. But regardless of the ethical questions it raises, it was nice to finally have all this new-fangled technology of mine actually work the way it’s supposed to, without crazy workarounds and hacks like I’m so used to being forced to use.