ManOlay.com

I simply chose a title at random to find out how ManOlay.com worked and actually found it very straightforward. You have a frame to the right with the list of all titles (unless you select a category – more about that in a moment) and from here you select your movie. Once you have done that you will see any extra details that are available as well as the cover shot. Beside this are your three streaming options: low, medium and high bandwidth plus a link to the full download.

Now then, the set up at this site looks good, the site is nicely designed and there are plenty of titles to choose from but I did have a couple of problems with the site. First off I downloaded a full file and, at 600Mbs, it took quite a while. Not a problem really as you can always go and do something else while you are waiting. But the file came down as a .flv and I’d never seen one of them before. I couldn’t get any of my players to run it – maybe that’s just a ‘me’ thing, you may be used to .flv files. In the end I found a piece of software on line that allowed me to convert it (very slowly) to a .avi file so I could play it, so all was well in the end.

In a way you are better off streaming especially if you have the file compatibility problem that I had. When you stream make sure you look out for the scene selection function in the player. Click this and the screen changes to show you thumbnails of each scene, simply click the one you want to jump to and away you go. That’s what I call a cool technical feature.

My second little gripe is about the information that the site puts out about each movie. Although I spent some time looking around and sampling movies most of the ones I saw had little or no information about them. The headings were there: Description – coming soon, Release Date – 27 07 2005 (for many of them), Director – NA… and so on. Some did have a little info but there wasn’t much in the way of description or write up so you could spend hours downloading or streaming them only to find they don’t contain what you were looking for. Having said that, the quality of the ones I did get to see was good and even at a low connection speed they were fine to watch.

I mentioned the categories and there are several of these. You use a drop down list to select what genre of movie you want to explore and, if there are any in that genre, the titles appear in the right hand frame. Trying Twinks I found six titles, any or all of which I could add to my favourites and/or rate. While I was searching I noticed that the streaming movie was still playing on the left even if I used the back button so don’t be afraid to browse while viewing. Although ManOlay.com states that it has over 800 titles (and I am sure it does) there were only three Classics and no Barebacking movies when I called in, the other categories were thin on the ground too. But the titles that I did explore were indeed full length. Movies tended to run for around one and a half hours, which is a pretty good length and when you think that you can download and keep them then you really are getting good value for money.