Choose And Watch TV

FOMDB stands for Free Online Movie DataBase, not necessarily original but known simply as FOMDB. The first thing that hit me on visiting this site was a barrage of popup windows. Actually it was one popup that subsequently launched 4 or 5 other popup windows. So my expectation from this site immediately sank as soon as that happened.

The site design is nice and simple, and there's a search box at the top for direct look-ups. Navigation is difficult because this looks like a video host, and the frontpage shows a lot of clips of various movies and television shows but no immediate place to see a list of movies is apparent on the frontpage, so you're stuck using the genre links on the lower bottom of the page to navigate through the videos available. Be sure to click on movies, and not select a genre at the same time or else you'll be limiting the movies to only those within that genre. This is a pretty tricky site to navigate because it resembles a video host but is actually a regular movie database site.

Most of the movies are hosted on Veoh, which is a nice change from all the Yoku and Toudou links on other sites - which of course FOMDB does use as well. The primary problem is that Veoh only lets you watch a 5 minute video preview, so you have to download Veoh TV to watch the entire films. I didn't feel like 'having another useless player sitting around so I found myself limited to just Yoku and Toudou movie links. If you do install the player there's a lot of movies to watch, most of which look to be higher quality then their Yoku counterparts.

FOMDB also tries to dabble in television shows but fails miserably because of the limited selection and that they rely on Tudou video links.

The Overall Ratings for FOMDB:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (4/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (2/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5) (Popups)
Based on the annoyance level of advertisements on this site, the amount of ads, and the volatility of ads appearing on the page.
The lower the rating, the less annoying the ads are.

Total Score: 12/20

FOMDB is a reasonably good destination for movies, mainly because they use a video platform that others don't use - Veoh. Veoh however requires downloading a special program that is known to be bloated with usless features and tag-along software that gets installed in the process, but if you can get over all this you could use FOMDB to watch a collection of older classic films that load quite quickly and are relatively good quality. The major downsides is the tricky navigation, which makes clicking a chore and could confuse visitors into seeing screen after screen of movies that or video clips that aren't related to what they have searched for. Additionally the numerous popups experienced throughout using this site were extremely annoying, if you use this site I'd strongly recommend a good popup blocker.

Labels: movies