Tryphoon’s Lair

A couple of weeks ago, Mike asked me to put my hands on a VuDu box. We ordered one, it arrived and I had the chance of testing it since.

So what is a Vudu Box? According to their website, it is a little box that will give you “instant access to thousands of movies, HD films, and TV Shows from any Television”, providing that you have a good internet connection.In principle, it is nothing more than a “MovieBeam” box, using TCP/IP instead of analog TV spectrum and having a real marketing campaign.

The Installation

What’s in the carton then? Well, a little Vudu Black box, a remote control, a couple of wires, batteries, an instructions manual (I first thought this was for seriously retarted people, until I had to refer to it) and a tiny piece of metal which looks like cheap FM antenna.Connecting the box to the TV set is very eas, using either S-Video, Composite, Component or HDMI on the video side, and analog or digital (both optical and coaxial) on the audio side.

Using the remote is extremely instinctive and the click-wheel idea is really good. When the remote itself work… One thing I didn’t realize was that the little piece of FM antenna was actually the RF receiver for the remote… RF remote? WTF?

THat hurdle passe, I had the box connected within minutes to the internet (wired connection) and to a TV set using an HDMI cable. The next step required me to put batteries in the tiny remote and install the remote antenna at the back of the box (more on this later). I powered the box and VOILA… A “Welcome” message shows up on the screen, telling me everything about the 4 steps of installation (See picture. see sound, set up resolution and network).

The 4th step required me to go back to my computer and to register the box with Vudu. An activation code was then displayed on the TV screen and I simply had to replicate it in my online (web based) account and the two parts of the process were now completed.

This done, I was informed that  the box was up and running and could being to receive content, while having to keep the box itself constantly on. I guess for background downloads of movies I might want to watch soon.

The movie renting/movie buying experience

Finding a movie on Vudu is extremely easy. The front page interface gives you the choice between various sections, being “Find Movies”, “New on Vudu”, “My Movies”, “My Wish List”, “Info & Settings”.

After a clik on find movies, I decided to look for some good old Sci Fi content, such as Babylon 5. This done, I could either rent the movie for less than $3, own it for $14 or add it to my wish list. I was able as well to look for similar movies. These last 2 options seemed to me to be extremely powerful as after a couple of minutes of pressing buttons on the remote, I ended up having created a long whish list of movies that I hadn’t seen yet, simply based on searching for a movie I knew and like (e.g. Bourne Identity) and once found, looking for similar movies, returning a full list of action packed thrillers full of spies and guns. I was in heaven!

The rental model gives you unlimited access to the movie you have rented, for a period of 24 hours, starting when you first play the movie.The buying/owning model gives you constant access to the movie in your library, and depending on your Internet connection speed, you either have to wait for a short while (especially for HD content) or you can start watching the movie immediately, while it is acquired via progressive download in the background.It was now time to start watching some of these movies…

The watching experience

My first test was an old movie, SD quality, poor encode, called “The boys from Brasil”…  Going from an HD (1080i) slick interface to a poor telecine SD encode resulted in me not watching this for more than 30 seconds. I know it is a good movie, but I don’t need to watch crappy SD content that looks like basic analog cable when I am using a next generation VOD device…

Second movie was this time a poor choice…. “Babylon 5 The Lost Tales”. Well, these tales should have remained lost for ever!!! On the technical side though, image was good, digital SD quality, no ghosting and I watched the entire movie while it was progressively being downloaded in the background. Bad movie. Good experience!

The third try was the latest of the Bourne trilogy, “The Bourne Ultimatum”, in HD please! First thing first: The price: At $24, this sounds a bit like a rip off. This is not an HD-DVD disc. This is just a file. No extras, no wrapping. A file! Well, who cares? This is for a good cause! The next issue was that, due to the size of the file and the image quality, the “Watch Now” option is disabled and I was informed that on an average Internet connection speed (3-5 Mbps), this would take up to 4 hours.I hence left and resumed my viewing experience a couple of days later.

Once the movie completely downloaded, the viewing experience was good. Not great but good, comparable to HD Video On Demand on cable TV here in the US (hence not as good as an HD satellite based VoD in the UK). Image was good, artifacts are minimal and sound is good.

Conclusion:

So, all in all, the Vudu Box is a great Video On Demand device, which goes towards one of my old predictions, which was that at some point, bandwidth will be so cheap that we will simply have devices that will download on the fly any movie I want to watch (the other one being that actually storage will be so cheap that we will own little devices that will have every single piece of media ever created on them and we will only acquire rights for these on a “need to watch: basis). It has both models, rental and download to own, which other devices don’t have yet (e.g. Apple TV, XBox 360, PS3), it has a slick interface, a funky remote and a large storage capacity.

But apart from this? Can someone really tell me why I should shell another $400 to get another box, on top of my HD DVR, my DVD player, Xbox 360, Apple TV, just to have the pleasure of having another box (which doesn’t do anything else than downloading and playing movies)? Honestly, this was already one of the comments I did read in the past when Disney released MovieBeam, and 4-5 years down the line, the same mistakes are made. I would even recommend to go for a Playstation 3 (and many people know how I dislike this console) rather than for the VuDu box, AT ITS CURRENT PRICE, as for the exact same price you would get a game console, a Blu Ray player, a VoD box that uses WiFi and doesn’t require you to run a long ethernet cable between your router and you TV…

Conclusion: Good but extremely limited product. Stupid pricing! Buy only if member of the über technophile geek clan.