Vudu has added an interesting wrinkle to its streaming-movie service — a line of higher definition movies that users download before watching.
Here are the Vudu basics: Users who connect a $300 box to both Television and Internet get instant access to roughly 6,000 movies and 4,000 Television shows — some of which are available in highly compressed high definition. 24-hour “rentals” cost $2 to $4 apiece. Purchases, which are stored on the machine’s expandable hard drive, cost about the same as DVDs.
Here are two new twists: First, if you fail to finish watching a movie in 24 hours, you can buy a second 24 hours for $1 rather than the full rental price. Second, if you’re willing to wait up to 3 hours for downloading and pay $6 for a 24-hour rental, you can now watch a limited number of films in far better looking HD.
David Pogue explains the picture difference in his review in the New York Times:
To see why HDX looks so good — especially on massive screens — check its data rate, a measure of how much information is used to describe each frame of the video. It averages around 9 megabits a second, but spikes to 20 during action scenes. Compare that with Vudu standard definition: (2.2 megabits a second), Vudu and Apple Television high definition (4), regular DVD (8) or Blu-ray DVD (40). In other words, HDX quality is somewhere between DVD and Blu-ray. The audio offers a 40 percent improvement, too.
When I look at those figures and notice that the HDX data rate is less than one quarter what I get from Blu-ray, I don’t feel particularly excited about Vudu or HDX, but Pogue insists that the pictures look great.
Still, even if you concede on image quality and accept the $6 price, you might pause to take into account selection. Only 65 titles were available in HDX when it launched on Oct. 1. Fortunately, Vudu says it will add 10-20 new titles a week.
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