V
udu delivers more HD content than
any other service, but achieving
that image quality requires you to
purchase a $300 box that can’t be truly
integrated into the rest of your home net-
work (meaning you can’t stream the content
downloaded to it from one room to another).
And the company currently has HD licensing
deals with only Lionsgate, Paramount, and
Universal; the rest of its offerings are limited
to standard defi nition.
Seduced by what we thought was ter-
rifi c image quality, we spent a long hon-
eymoon with the Vudu. The box is cool
and extremely quiet (it had no issues with
being tucked inside our entertainment
center), the intuitive user interface is supe-
rior to any of the web-based alternatives,
and the custom remote control is sheer
genius. Vudu encodes the fi lms it offers in
a proprietary fl avor of MPEG-4, and the
box downloads fi lms in the highest resolu-
tion your display will support (from 480i
to 1080p). But since the Vudu’s 1080p
output is timed at 24 frames per second
(to match the original fi lm), the box had to
drop down to 1080i in order to be compat-
ible with our ViewSonic N4285p television
(which can display 1080p, but only at a
refresh rate of 30Hz or 60Hz).
But our newlywed bliss evaporated
when we fi nally compared the downloaded
HD versions of movies played on the Vudu
box to the same fi lms played on the Blu-ray
drive in our home-theater PC: Vudu’s ver-
sions offered signifi cantly less detail. Video
image quality was leagues beyond the soft-
edged offerings on tap from the standard-
defi nition services, but it wasn’t nearly as
good as what we saw on the disc.Movie buffs should also bear in mind
that movies encoded in high defi nition make
for much larger fi les than what the other
services have to offer. Vudu, like all the other
services reviewed here, uses a progressive
download system, so you don’t need to
download the entire movie before you begin
watching it. But if your broadband Internet
connection is 1.5Mb/s or slower, you will
experience a signifi cant delay—it could be
an hour or more—before you’ve grabbed
enough of the fi le to start. Vudu recom-
mends having at least a 2Mb/s connection
for standard-defi nition movies and a 4Mb/s
connection for HD content.
Vudu offers movies for rent and pur-
chase and TV shows for purchase. The
service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis,
but your credit card
is billed in $20, $50,
or $100 increments,
as opposed to the
per-transaction
basis that the other
services operate on.
Movies downloaded
to the Vudu’s 250GB
hard drive are stuck
there; they can’t be
burned to disc (even
for backup purposes),
streamed across anetwork using a Media Center Extender, or
transferred to a portable device. Vudu tells
us its customers will be able to re-download
purchased movies in the event of a hard-
drive failure or other catastrophe.
Vudu’s back catalog listed three of the
AFI’s top 25 movies for sale ( Lawrence of
Arabia, Psycho, and Chinatown ), but it
didn’t offer any of them for rent. Reservoir
Dogs (available for $10) was the only movie
on our list of cult classics we could fi nd for
sale or rent.
At press time, the Vudu box was about
$50 cheaper than the least-expensive Blu-
ray drive and about half the price of a Blu-
ray-equipped DIY home-theater rig, but is
the instant gratifi cation of watching a movie
without having to go to the store (and hop-
ing it’s in stock) or waiting for it to show up
from Netfl ix (with the same caveat) worth
knowing that the image quality is worse than
what you would get from a disc? We’re not
so sure the trade-off is worthwhile.34 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Vudu
We really want to like this service
The Vudu has an excellent 10-foot interface, but its image quality is not much better
than what you’d get with a cable or satellite set-top box.defi nition services, but it wasn’t nearly as chase and TV shows for purchase. The
good as what we saw on the disc.chase and TV shows for purchase. The
service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis,The Vudu offers an attractive industrial design, but it stays
cool enough that you can hide it in the depths of your enter-
tainment center.VERDICT7
Hardware: $300
Movie rentals: $4 to $6
Movie purchases:
$10 to $20
TV episodes: $2
http://www.vudu.comDOWNLOAD
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