The best F1 video website
Everyone is after F1 video.
Internet video behemoth Youtube is straining under the weight of decades of F1 clips. Even F1 monthly magazine F1 Racing recently ran a feature on where to find the best F1 clips on the Internet.
But what F1 fans really want is to be able to watch entire races – past and present – online. And Youtube, with its poxy 10 minute clips, is not up to the task. Nor, of course, are the majority of the clips on there being shared legally.
Those who want to get decent F1 video on the Internet – and are happy to chance their arms with the greyer areas of copyright law – are doing it quite differently. And much better.
Non-championship Grand Prix races from the 1970s, the World Sportscar Championship in the eighties, Nigel Mansell’s year-and-a-bit in Indycars, last year’s GP2 season – Vendors like Duke Video do a fantastic job of selling F1 season reviews videos but you can’t just pop down a shop and buy footage of races like these.
Of course there’s stacks of recorded F1 footage on eBay, but a lot of it isn’t very good quality and there’s always the concern of how long the DVD-Rs much of it is stored on will last.
In a perfect world, Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One Administration would take the same approach to Internet video that the Champ Car World Series does – for a modest monthly fee (£2.63) you can have access to Race Director which includes not only all the races during a season via live, multi-camera streams, but also an archive of races going back to 2001.
Think what an amazing service FOA could provide if they allied that kind of thinking with their archive of F1 races dating back to 1979! Yes, please…
But while FOA drag their heels on that and everything else, where can an F1 fan get his historic motorsport fix from in the meantime? Especially in the long, desolate months of the off-season.
BitTorrent.
How does it work? Grab a client such as Azureus or uTorrent. Now all you need to do is find a ‘torrent’ (basically a link) for the race you’re after.
There’s various sites that offer Torrents for all sorts of files but for something as specialised as motor sport it’s best to look for a site that does just racing stuff.
I reckon these guys do the best job – but a word of advice. If you are going to use this kind of site, make sure you share as much material as you take – otherwise sites as good as this may not last very long. And do bear in mind that you are treading into decidedly dubious legal territory if you use these sites to obtain any copyrighted material.
Not that you would ever do anything as heinous as that.
Related links
Tags: f1 / formula one / grand prix / motor sport
I have been using torrents for quite some time but it is not necessary that you will find all the races.I use Torrentspy and it is sometimes tough to get a good download speed and the lack of seeders can prove to be another problem.Another site for vidoes can is the [url=http://www.markwebberblog.com/index.php]Mark Webber Blog[/url] where you can find videos related to Mark Webber(like the on-board view of Raikkonen when Webber overtook him at Imola).But this guy recently put up a ‘Full Race Download’ section.So do give it a look.Now I am going to download Japan 2005.
Great article, it’s a pity FOM don’t put full races up for download, even for a fee, they could make a mint!
Abhunav has already linked to my site, thanks for that, though I should mention I got most of my videos from RU, or from it’s father F1RW. Still, some people don’t like the torrent system and having to sign up so I try and offer a basic alternative – room enough for both I’m sure!
Idle thought, but isn’t Bernie missing a huge trick here? If he were to make archive races available for download, for a small fee, I’d be more than happy to pay for them.
Of course, all of the material you refer to is technically illegal – there won’t be any that *isn’t* under copyright, but almost all of it is also not available anywhere, paid for or free, legally. So its hard to see quite whose legitimate business is being hurt in this case. Its not like big TV shows which get sold on as DVD box sets, or films, or music, after all…
Easiest thing to do is just use google… I just searched “ITV F1 torrent” and got the indy race.
mininova.org or darmeth (google)
How do you get an invite code for Racing Underground?
I’m also having trouble getting onto racing underground because of the invitation code
I think if Bernie made the downloads available for a small fee that could work. Also what puts me off is the time it takes to fill out payment forms, if it was a simple as a couple of clicks I think more people would pay, most web users are lazy these days.
Probably not best to be talking about torrents on here.!