Vudu made a couple of CES announcements…
Since their $399 movie download STB isn’t quite expensive enough, Vudu has introduced a higher priced model at $999 – offering only increased storage. From a business perspective, I get it – hard drives are cheap and “Vudu XL” margins will be much higher than the base Vudu model. However, from a marketing standpoint, I’m not sure this sends the right message. Especially with Netflix announcing unlimited movie downloads today, Apple expected to introduce movie rentals tomorrow (including Apple TV playback), and Comcast’s Project Infinity which should quadruple their VOD offerings this year. The need for a larger hard drive also emphasizes a limitation in Vudu’s licensing terms… Purchased (as opposed to rented) movies cannot be deleted and re-downloaded at a later date (as Amazon Unbox allows).
Having said that, the Vudu interface and selection are still better than most. As is the physical design. Vudu also announced they’d be offering more HD content – 70 titles by the end of the month. With a 4Mbps connection, playback will be instantaneous. I haven’t always been pleased with Comcast TV service and technicians, but my Internet connectivity has been outstanding – so I’ll report back later this month on Vudu’s HD offerings.
Dave, given that they’ll have to stream at under 6Mbps or so to work in a majority of broadband households, HD quality will obviously be an interesting question. I think AT&T is still running h.264 HD content at 8Mbps and they have lots of incentive to drop it lower, but they haven’t yet so you’ve got to assume the encoders aren’t there yet. Anyway, if you can shed some light on the issue–720p or 1080i, bit rate, streaming vs. download, and visual quality in motion scenes, that would be interesting…
One thing that does bug me about the Vudu box is the limitation that you cannot delete and download again any content that you have purchased. I love that about Amazon Unbox.
Well, not ‘only’, the XL apparently adds an IR receiver so it can use IR remotes. ;-)
As for quality – keep in mind Blu-ray allows video bitrates of 40Mbps – and that’s JUST video. Max total bitrate is 54Mbps with audio, subs, etc. While HD DVD is limited to just under 30Mbps for video – and some studios have said that the extra head-room on Blu-ray for higher video bitrates has been important for them to improve quality. And that’s with H.264 or VC-1 codecs.
So *4*Mbps with H.264, just 1/10 what Blu-ray can do – something has got to give. BD is 1080p, even if they do 1080i or 720p something has got to give.
That’s one expensive IR chip! ;)
Actually, I’d be fine with the current remote if it OUTPUT IR to adjust television volume. The other buttons/mappings I could live without. And their scroll wheel is nice (except during ffw/rw – which they should tweak).
With all of the BOGO offers and rebates, I could buy about 70 HDM discs and not have to pay for rental fees. I think that Vudu’s marketing/business model is ludicrous.
MegaZone, ya I’m reasonably familiar with the bit rates. Cable is typically using 15Mbps or so for HD MPEG-2 VOD. With h.264 for the same quality (i.e. imperfect but okay most of the time), you presumably need at least 8Mbps or so, and that’s assuming the encoders have had sufficient time to “bake”.
I will now be re-selling 1TB drives for $799. No cumbersom plastic box or remote to lose, just a simple, sleek, no frills hard drive. Get them while you can!
From what I read on Vudu’s forums, delete & download functionality is something that they are working on and I can’t imagine this would be anyone’s biggest gripe about this box (there are enough valid reasons, but I don’t feel like typing up all of them up).
With regards to HD video, I was told by a moderator that it’s in 1080p/24 so they can fit in in 4 GB. But again, HD quality on existing movies has been generally well-received, so it’s not a major issue.
1080p/24 in H.264 at 4Mbps == over-compressed.
There’s just no way to not lose quality doing 1080p/24 in only 4Mbps with H.264 – or VC-1, or any codec available today. Sure, it will look better than SD, but do an A/B comparison with Blu-ray or HD DVD, or even ATSC or most digital cable, on a decent screen and you should easily see the difference.
Most Blu-ray and HD DVD discs are H.264 or VC-1, and when the source is film usually 1080p/24, and the bitrates are 5-10x as high. Even then people will sometimes notice compression issues.
So VUDU is sacrificing quality in the name of instant playback capabilities. They pretty much have to. The choice is higher quality but longer download times, much slower than real-time, or instant playback at a lower quality.
Broadband speeds aren’t there yet, except maybe for the very high end FiOS offerings, to have both high encode quality and instant playback.
I’d rather they did 8Mbps h.264 HD and just have to wait an hour or so before you start the movie. If you want fast downloads, you pick the SD. Agreed that 4Mbps h.264 video isn’t going to look good at all… h.264 doesn’t get all blocky like MPEG-2, but the picture is going to look awfully fuzzy during any kind of action sequence or pan or flowing water or anything with a lot of red or …
I have a feeling that people here haven’t actually watched HD content on Vudu. Nobody’s claiming that Vudu’s HD quality equals that of high-def media. However, the quality of HD movies so far (Bourne trilogy) has been very well received. I think the general feeling on Vudu forums is that the quality beats any other source except high-def media. Sure, it’d be sweet to download/rent exact copies of high-def media, but it’s not feasable yet. All companies seem to settle in 4-5 GB zone for HD – Xbox Live, Vudu, Apple…
Ivan, you bring up a good point to keep it in perspective. In many cases, I’m willing to trade a smidgen of quality for instant gratification. In fact, I watched an episode of Burn Notice purchased through iTunes last night. Quality wasn’t great when blown up, but it’s the show I wanted to see at that moment.
Ivan,
I’m sure VUDU HD content is good for what it is, and I’d certainly hope it is better than SD content. And it is the sacrifice for instant gratification, as Dave says. You can have decent quality now, or great quality later.
One key difference with the other services is that they tend to use 720p, not 1080p. That *greatly* reduces the amount of data that needs to be compressed. I’m not sure what you mean by 4-5GB – file size? That doesn’t make sense since file size is going to vary by run time. We’re talking 4Mbps – bit rates, not sizes. A 720p image compressed into 4Mbps is going to be much less compressed than a 1080p image compressed into 4Mbps, and the 720p image will almost always look better because of it.
I’m not sure why VUDU selected 1080p when they know they have a bandwidth issue to cope with, other than for to be able to claim ‘full 1080p’ in their marketing literature.
Having the option of selecting ‘lower quality now’ or ‘higher quality later’ would be nice – but then they’d need to have two copies of the film distributed on their P2P network.