VUDU has some of the best quality streaming video, if you can get it...

Nov 23, 2010

by TeamAWAC
posted in Home Theater Technology

Exclusive to the Lunch Network

Rating:

Due to a promotion offered by Wal-Mart, I recently became interested in VUDU's online movie streaming service. The deal was if you purchased the Toy Story 3 BluRay disk from Wal-Mart, you would get a free copy to include in your VUDU library to stream whenever you wanted. Unfortunately, I never got the deal to work out, but I was still intrigued by the VUDU service.

VUDU as a service is built-in to several home theater components, including HDTV's, bluray players, and more recently, the Boxee Box. It allows you to rent or purchase movies which are then streamed directly to you. When I signed up, I was given a credit for a free movie rental to try it out. I was using VUDU via Boxee Software on my Mac Mini. Unfortunately, due to VUDU's licensing agreements with use on a Mac or PC, I wasn't able to stream any of the High-Definition streams. VUDU was available from my LG TV, but not on my particular LG bluray player. Instead, I settled on a standard def rental of "Date Night" (because we were watching the movie on the projector -- not on the TV).

Browsing the VUDU interface via the Boxee software was less than ideal. Even though I knew what I wanted to watch, I had a hard time finding the movie I was looking for. I couldn't find a "Search" function in the interface, so I had to page through several pages of movies before I could find what I was looking for. Unless you're planning to watch a "recently released" or "most watched", it could take some time to find what you're looking for.

The standard def picture was better than I had expected, and when I had played some of the HD movie samples through a different device, I was very impressed with the picture and audio quality. In my opinion, the HD quality was better than the HD streaming from Netflix, and on-par or slightly better than HD content from the Apple TV.

Provided the VUDU service becomes available on more devices (I believe the PS3 is slated to get it today), I would not hesitate to use them again. The interface could use some work, but the quality of the picture is currently only second to bluray.

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woopak_the_thrill November 23, 2010

Thanks for this. I was curious when I saw some promos around stores but never took the time to really research them. Nowadays, BD is still expensive, even dvd isn't that cheap and it helps to have good quality HD streams. Thanks!!

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About the reviewer

Andrew (TeamAWAC)
Ranked #1

I'm a technology early adopter. I thoroughly enjoy geeking out with the latest hardware, software and electronics. I probably have as much fun setting up, tweaking, and configuring systems as I do actually … more