How do I download public domain movies to my Mac?

I know what you mean about the miasma of illegal content on the peer to peer (p2p) networks, which is really too bad because BitTorrent and the torrent networks are actually a very cool way to download very large files, like 700MB movie files.

Fortunately, there are a couple of sites where you can grab public domain movies, notably Google Video. Let's have a quick look at that before I show a second alternative too. To find movies, click on "Advanced Search" on the Google Video page, then try assembling a search like this:

A few seconds later you get a list with, frankly, tons of options, 7,913 when I tried this, including the following:

There's a lot more, but many of them (like Jackass) are surely illegally uploaded to the site, specifically the kind of content you wanted to avoid. I admit, too, that it's quite a task to pick through the thousands of unknown oddities to find something worth your attention and disk space.

Fortunately, there's a much better alternative than Google Video for this type of thing, and it's a site called Public Domain Torrents.com. Even better, the movies are available in the bittorrent network, so they can download surprisingly quickly onto your computer once they get going.

The site's divided up into the following categories: Action/Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Exploitation, Family, Horror, Martial Arts, Musicals, Mystery/Suspense, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Serials, War, and Westerns. Sounds like enough for any taste, doesn't it?

Digging into Action/Adventure, there are over 200 films listed in the site's crude and confusing style:

I'm going to check out the movie Hercules Against the Moon Men, which gives me a brief description:

"In ancient Greece a race of evil aliens from the moon land on earth. For years they've terrorized the nearby city of Samar, demanding children for sacrifice. Now, the queen of Samar has made a pact with the moon men to conquer the world and become the most powerful woman alive. However, the residents of Samar, sick of all the chaos, cheer when the mighty Hercules shows up to put a stop to it all."

A set of stills from the movie itself:

And, near the bottom a set of download links for the different video formats and download options:

I'm going to grab the top link, the 716MB AVI file, which is actually a ".torrent". Once clicked, I end up with Hercules_Against_the_Moonmen.avi.torrent on my desktop. Now what?

It's time to download a BitTorrent client, which can be done at a variety of sites including VersionTracker.com and Download.com.

I already have the standard BitTorrent client for my Mac (which you can get at Bittorrent.com too), so I'm going to go ahead and open up the Hercules torrent in the program. Here's what I see:

Now the only task required is to wait. I usually let torrents run overnight, regardless of the estimate of how long it'll take, and in the morning it's downloaded and ready to view. Easy enough. In fact, just a few minutes later there are now three seeds added to the list. A "seed" in p2p jargon is someone who already has the entire file and is willing to transfer pieces to you, while a "peer" is someone who, like you, doesn't yet have the entire file but is willing to share what they receive if you'll share your data too. More is better, in both categories.

The next morning, finally, I have an easily viewable copy of the, um, 'classic' old movie Hercules Against the Moon Men ready to copy to my laptop or otherwise view as I'd like. When I searched for the movie on YouTube or Google Video? No luck.

Finally, if you have problems watching an AVI or DivX on your Mac, i strongly recommend the video player VLC as a superior alternative to Quicktime.

There are plenty of other sites with these public domain movies and TV shows available too, so perhaps a few fans can list their favorites and talk about what makes 'em so cool?