Raymond.CC Blog

Two of the most common ways to download movies is via torrents and file hosting links such as RapidShare. Normally you would have to completely download all the files/parts, extract it to get the avi video file and then play it on your favorite media player. By doing that alone, you would have to spend at least an hour depending on the speed of your Internet connection. Then you have to spend another one and a half to two hours to watch the movie. A very good method to save your precious time is by streaming which means it can play the video while it is downloading.

During my time away from writing in this blog, I have discovered two very impressive and useful applications named ilivid Player and RapidTV. Both of them allows you to easily “stream” video from RapidShare links automatically without having to fully download all parts of the video first. Other than that, you can also use this software to preview the videos.


First lets take a look at ilivid Player. The good thing about ilivid Player is it supports premium account up to 73 file host. This is very important because file hosting websites such as RapidShare implements speed limitations for free users which would be quite impossible to stream at the maximum speed of 50KBps. Next, the interface is pretty easy to use without too many configurations. ilivid Player forces you to use VLC media player to play the video files which is not really a big deal because it is a fact that VLC media player is one of the top if not the best media player. ilivid Player has the ability to detect if your connection is fast enough to handle the streaming and if not, it tries to reconnect to find a faster server to download.

As for RapidTV, it has very good concept but it is quite unstable. There is a built-in web browser on the left pane that uses the Internet Explorer engine to browse the web. When you visit any web page from the RapidTV browser, it will auto scan the page for any available RapidShare links with password and verify them if they are alive or dead. This saves you the trouble of manually copying, pasting and checking the links but during this time, the application seems to hang and you can’t do anything on it. RapidTV allows you to use your favorite media player although they recommend GOM Player. RapidTV uses a calculation method called HDNow to monitor transfer and tells you when you can play the movie without buffering.

Both ilivid Player and RapidTV are in BETA so it is expected to have some bugs while using it. I personally had no problems with ilivid Player but encountered some .NET error popups “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” on RapidTV. RapidTV also seemed to be a shareware in future because the official website said “For free only until the end of May 2010!” and in the program there is a menu to Activate/Buy the software. The most important factor to be able to stream from RapidShare is to have a stable and fast Internet connection. If your connection is not fast enough, this two software is useful for previewing the videos that you want to download.