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BLOCKBUSTER is looking better and better. For all the fuss over movie downloading--legitimate and otherwise--it remains a process fraught with limitations and frustrations, even when using high-speed modems.

Just try taking a couple of hours to download a 110-minute feature like director Frank Oz's "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," which weighs in at a hefty 200 megabytes.

A sampling of three downloading services resulted in disappointing choices, long waits, technological failures and, in the end, less-than-stellar resolution when the film could be played at all.

"The size of the files involved is horrifying," said Julian Bunn, a senior scientist at California Institute of Technology. "It's not so horrifying if you're working in high-end computing like me, trying to set Internet speed records. But if you're moving that amount of data over a standard network, it's going to take a lot of time."

There are two leading vehicles for downloading films. One is through a peer-to-peer network like Kazaa of Morpheus that allows a user to tap into the file, at no cost, on another individual's PC and pull the file over. The other is to link to one of the two industry-backed services and download after paying a small fee for one-time use.

Each method has its advantages and its flaws, and neither is quick.

The industry sites, CinemaNow Inc. and MovieLink LLC, have woefully limited selection and require long download times and software upgrades. The selection available via Kazaa, considered by the studios to violate their copyrights, is vastly superior, but it, too, has long download times. Plus, there's the potential cost to defend litigation over copyright violations, which makes $2 to $5 paid to download from industry-backed sites seem like a bargain.

In putting Kazaa, CinemaNow and MovieLink through their paces on a new computer running Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (the movie sites won't run on older versions of Windows) with an Intel Celeron 2.7 GHz processor and a high-speed cable hookup over a wireless local area network, the realities of downloading film came into sharper focus.

Previews

The first viewing choice was the Stanley Kubrick classic, "A Clockwork Orange."

It was not available on either MovieLink or CinemaNow. The next choice was another more accessible classic, "The Wizard of Oz." Still nothing at either site.

"Our goal is to get every piece of film on our service," said Bruce Eisen, executive vice president of Marina del Rey-based CinemaNow Inc., a venture of Lions Gate Entertainment.

For now, the two services are far from that goal. MovieLink has about 800 films in its library, CinemaNow about 1,500 files, a quarter of which are sexually explicit films.

"We're continuing to grow our catalog," said Jim Ramo, chief executive of MovieLink, formed by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment. Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., the latter of which has a library of more than 4,000 films in its vaults.

There's a good reason the titles available to download from industry sites favor new releases over older, classic films.

"It's expensive," said Eisen. "It's not like they go into some vault, pull a piece of paper and say 'Now it's clear.' They have to go back to the people who were involved in the production of the movie, and everybody has their hand out. It's not that they don't want to."

So it was onto a more recent release, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," a 1988 comedy starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin.

Both CinemaNow and MovieLink start with a registration screen requiting an e-mail address, physical address, a user name, password and credit card information. Both require the download of file management software that houses the movie file on the PC.

And both services allow a movie to be viewed only once in any 24-hour period for 30 days after the download. Once the viewer clicks "play," the clock starts, and when it ends the file management software automatically deletes the movie.

With all the financial and technological requirements met, it's time to download.

Intermission

Once underway, MovieLink's software posted the download time for "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels": 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Figuring most people can't sit and watch an hourglass spin for that long, another effort was made to throw the system for a loop: the computer was shut down. When it was booted up again, MovieLink picked up right where the process stopped.

Just over 1 hour and 20 minutes into the download, the movie was on the hard drive. Once "play" was pressed, a note appeared on the screen indicating that the 24-hour period had begun. A day later the file was deleted from the system.

Just as well. Far from the digital quality of a DVD, the picture on a desktop computer was blurry. It was sharp in a small Windows Media Player window, a less-than-ideal way to watch a feature film.

MovieLink says picture quality is affected by a number of different factors, like the quality of a graphic card and the speed of the processor.

CinemaNow was next. After the registration process the download was started, only to freeze almost immediately. Several attempts to restart resulted in a frozen downloads.

Back to the beginning: after rebooting the computer and re-entering the account information the download started fine, and was far faster at 25 minutes.

("Any number of network conditions could cause download times to vary," said Bruce Anderson, MovieLink's vice president of Web engineering and operations. Anderson said this specific experience may have been unusual and that its download times can vary from 20 minutes to well over an hour, depending on computer speed and network traffic.)

The same power outage experiment was employed, but the CinemaNow software did not pick up and the download had to be started all over again.

A half-hour later--almost 45 minutes since first logging on to CinemaNow--the movie finished downloading. A similar 24-hour notice came up and the same auto-delete feature removed the file from the computer a day later.

Though faster to download, the resolution of this version was no better than the one from MovieLink.

Third act

It was on to Kazaa to check the scope of the libraries available on other individuals' hard drives.

After downloading its file-sharing software, Kazaa users go through a modest registration process that consists of choosing a screen name and identifying country of residence (Kazaa is a product of Sydney, Australia-based Sharman Networks Ltd.).

Once that process is complete, what seems like the entire film world is opened.

Its search function yielded a few versions of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Wizard of Oz" available for download, along with a few copies of "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."

But once the downloading began, so did the Adventure.

Peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa connect two computers to each other. That means what is available at any given time can change, depending on who is online.

The downloading process took more than an hour and a half and was wrought with starts and stops. One attempt to download "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" stalled when the source computer was turned off.

Though the interruption was frustrating and the downloading process is a violation of copyright laws, the upside of the peer-to-peer system is that if a download stops there are often other files from which to choose.

One was found, and after several fits and starts, it ended up on the hard drive after an hour and a half, there to be watched without constraint as often as desired. Maybe.

Once downloaded, the file failed to open. An error message appeared on the Windows Media Player screen saying the file couldn't be opened.

Fortunately, the local video store had all three films in stock and is only a block away.

Dirty, Rotten Process

Downloading the Steve Martin-Michael Caine film "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" was no easy task.

MovieLink LLC

URL: movielink.com

Cost: $4.99

Download Time: Approximately 1 hour 30 minutes

Features: Modest selection, restarts downloads if interrupted; auto-erase after deadline

Process:

0:00--Visit site

0:05--Enter data for new account