Sucubus - A New Music & Video Online Search Engine

September 18, 2008 by sharky

Recently-launched Sucubus is a new search utility for finding music and video files on the ‘Net. The application itself is installed on the host’s computer, but the interface (GUI) and searching is conducted through a browser. But what makes Sucubus unique is in the ability to save video files in a variety of formats, including AVI (XviD), iPod (MP4), PSP, iPhone, and DVD formats - not only does this make Sucubus great for searching, but also a versatile on-the-fly converter.

Sucubus is open-source software. That means that everyone has access to the source code and can contribute to the project. Currently it’s only available for Windows XP and Vista (Mac coming soon).

Music Searching:

When downloading MP3’s from the music results on the search page, the quality can vary greatly depending on the website that is hosting the file. After downloading a wide assortment of music, our MP3 bitrates ranged from anywhere between 128 to 320 (and lots on both extremes). At present time there’s no way of knowing beforehand what the bitrate will be until the song has completed downloading, as the file size (which offers a good clue) is not displayed next to the results.

In contrast to Limewire or other P2P filesharing programs that list alternative sources that are easily sorted via bitrates, sizes and the like, Sucubus currently doesn’t offer a solution to this. Duplicates (alternative downloads of varying bitrates) are also displayed in the search results, but the file names remain identical, and you’ll need to delete (or move) any existing saved .MP3 files before being able to download an alternative selection of the same name. While this is somewhat of an inconvenience, the positive spin to this is that there is no "Shared Folder" scenario associated with Limewire (and others) thus removing the concern for RIAA lawsuits due to copyright infringements and unlawful sharing.

Video Searching:

For video searching, Sucubus incorporates the YouTube engine - so you’ll be hard-pressed to find any (copyrighted) full movies. As with YouTube’s strict policy on intellectual property rights, copyrighted material is quickly deleted, especially when blatantly labeled and easily identifiable. For an example, we searched Sucubus for "Dark Knight" and were overwhelmed with over 60,000 video results. Narrowing the search to "Dark Knight DVDSCR" and "Dark Knight mvs" (the proper release that’s making the BitTorrent/P2P rounds), as expected didn’t yield any full movie downloads, just an assortment of short clips. Having said that, you may come across files that won’t play in the Sucubus YouTube player, yet are still available for download.

But this is not what Sucubus is all about. Copyrighted content aside, it’s an excellent utility for online converting of YouTube’s streaming video into downloadable versions to suit almost any video container (format). No longer do you need to employ sophisticated (and costly) third-party software applications to save YouTube videos to your hard drive. Sucubus has that covered.

Downloading & Preferences

Download speeds are insanely fast, and only limited by your Internet connection. On a 10 mbit home ISP package, most songs came through in under 30 seconds, and the number of simultaneous downloads is set to 100.

By default, downloads are saved into your ‘C:\Program Files\Sucubus\downloads’ directory, but this path can easily be changed in the online user "Preferences". Additionally, the default video "save" container is Windows Media Video (.WMV) although a wide variety of other formats exist:

OUR NOTES: Sucubus is an excellent utility to easily find both video and music files. For connoisseurs of YouTube who wish to effortlessly save video clips that support a large array of formats, Sucubus offers an impressive solution. For music, results are good but require some additional user finesse - it’s no substitute for a decent private tracker. Sucubus is very decent at finding obscure individual MP3 files, without the need for downloading complete albums or worrying about ratios. None of which takes away from the overall functionality of this very impressive online P2P program/webapp. A true winner!

Archived by FSFmirror