Porn Surfing 101

Exclusive video is by far the most popular type of content on any pay site. All of the best sites offer exclusive video; others only offer "plug-in" or leased content provided by another porn production company; the same plug-in content is therefore available on many different sites.

Much of the time you get a lot more than just sex in the videos;  there are often video interviews with the guys before they get into the sex, so you get more of a feel of their personality and background. Videos are usually between 10 and 20 minutes long and can be of superb DVD quality -- or absolute crap.

Video-on-demand (or pay-per-view) sites offer video from a variety of gay porn studios. With these sites you don't pay a monthly membership. Instead, you can "rent" a single movie or scene or buy time and "pay per minute," switching between as many videos as you like. For more details, check out BananaGuide's reviews of VOD sites.

Stream or Download?

Most pay sites offer two types of video: streams and downloads.

True streaming video allows you to watch the video in real time as it is "streamed" from the porn site to your computer. With true streaming video you can jump back and forth to any part of the video as soon as it starts to play. Streaming video does not save on your computer for future playback.

In fact,  most video that is called "streaming" these days is technically a "progressive download"; with progressive downloads the video file starts to   download to your computer while you start watching it. You cannot skip forward or back within the video until the download is complete, but once the progressive download is complete you won't have any buffering pauses like you may get with true streaming video.

Under ideal conditions, streaming video is clear and continuous, but top of the line technology must be used to create, send and receive the video. Usually, downloaded videos provide superior playback.

Downloaded video saves a large file to your computer. You must wait for the video to completely download before watching it. This can take a while for top quality videos because they can be very large files.

Some pay sites allow you to keep and view downloaded video files as long as you like; others use Digital Rights Management technology to license the video so that you have access to it for only a designated period, sometimes only for as long as you are a paying member of the site, but more often for the life of the computer.

There are a number of different formats for Web video, including:

 Windows Media (.WMV) played with the Windows Media Player

Real Media (.RM) played with RealPlayer

Flash (.FLV) played with the Flash Player

MPEG-4 (.MP4 .M4V) played with the QuickTime Player

QuickTime (.QT .MOV) played with the QuickTime Player

You may also occasionally find video offered in other outmoded formats such as DivX or AVI. New free versions of the video players are released regularly. Like any new version of software it is best to way a few months after a new release before installing it so that the bugs can be worked out. Otherwise you may have some trouble playing the video on membership sites.

Often you can play competing video formats in one player. For example, the RealOne Player "Plus" can play Windows Media and QuickTime files.