Why DivX Stage6 Is Good
Recently I’ve been looking at DivX’s Stage6 video portal, and I have to say, it’s good! I think I like it more than YouTube right now, for a few simple reasons which make it a much more usable and useful site.
High Quality
Let’s accept something: 320×240 videos suck a bit. They’re not all that bad, it’s just that if you have a big screen resolution, or if you want to watch them in full screen, then they are a little bit useless … unless you like pixels. Stage6 videos can have very high resolution: including High Definition 1280×720. This is certainly very nice to watch in full screen, especially on a high-resolution display. However, the tradeoff is file size, which translates to longer download times. This means you have to hang around while it buffers, which is especially annoying on a comparatively-narrowband 512Kbit connection. However, these pesky download times are counteracted by:
Easy Downloading
Stage6 makes it very easy to download content. Very easy. They put a bloody Download button right on the player! This is a great leap ahead of YouTube, which requires you to go to one of many video downloader sites to get the Flash video file. The result from that is a dodgy 320×240 Flash video file, which is pretty useless. You can play it in VLC or Media Player Classic, but if you wanted to put it into something like Sony Vegas you’ll have to convert it first. This additional transcoding will make the quality even more questionable. However when you download from Stage6, you get the video as a high-res DivX file. This can be played with anything, provided you have some form of mpeg4 decoder which will play DivX AVI files (personally I use XviD as it’s open source and pretty much equivalent).
It’s easy to grab the link to download a video from Stage6 from the Object tag in the HTML (it should look something like http://video.stage6.com/1586481/.divx). You can then feed this link to your favourite download manager. Personally I use Wget, because it’s an awesome piece of coding. Here’s an example of how it’s done:
wget -c -O the_best_show_ever.avi http://video.stage6.com/1586481/.divx
Of course you could also just click the Download button, which will bring up your Save As dialog in Firefox or Opera. 
The DivX Player
What?! People who know me know of my hate for sites, products, and platforms which require their own proprietary software. However, I’m making an exception for the DivX player. Sure it’s annoying to have to install it (they could have gotten the same functionality using Flash, which is installed on 98% of internet connected devices worldwide), but they have actually done some nice things with it. As well as the aforementioned download button, it includes one really nice feature: the desktop dimmer. When you play a video, the rest of the desktop will slowly dim. This draws your focus towards the video, and blocks out the distraction of any instant messengers, banner ads, and everything else that could prevent you from paying attention to the video. I’d download a plugin just for that feature. 
A good thing about the implementation of this custom plugin is that it degrades gracefully when it is unavailable. The plugin is for Windows and Mac, so it caters for most (not all) users, but you can still watch the content if you don’t have the plugin. The site puts the download link there, so you can copy and paste it into whatever media player you have, provided it plays a DivX AVI from an HTTP source. You could play it on Linux using Mplayer, or you could play it on your Xbox Media Center. Or, if you’re on a work computer where you can’t install anything, you can still copy and paste the download link into Windows Media Player. Point is, if you don’t have the player, you’re not screwed. You can still play the content, and this is an excellent thing.
So that, is why I like DivX Stage6 right now. Of course it’s absolutely nothing to do with the amount of high-quality TV shows that are buried in there.
–Ben
BTW: If you have the patience to download the 250mb video file in this article, you will find a rather hilarious and inventive British comedy.