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The Fandango at Home Forums are designed to help viewers get the most out of their Fandango at Home experience. Here, Fandango at Home customers may post information, questions, ideas, etc. on the subject of Fandango at Home and Fandango at Home -related issues (home theater, entertainment, etc). Although the primary purpose of these forums is to help Fandango at Home customers with questions and/or problems with their Fandango at Home service, there are also off-topic areas available within the Fandango at Home Forums for users to chat with like-minded people, subject to the limitations below.

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Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

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    #31
    Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

    Another good example. When they see the unidentified aircraft on the radar. The text at the bottom of the radar screen is unreadable on the VUDU SD version. You can easily read it on the VUDU HD version.

    Comment


      #32
      Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

      Originally posted by aaronwt View Post
      But you also can't compare the bitrates on a disc with streaming video.
      Well I totally agree you can't compare bitrates to quality, it's all about the compression/decompression quality over the medium.

      That's why I'm leaning more and more to some sort of realistic unbiased set of benchmarks to compare quality.

      Maybe we can let Chico pick the remte that has the best picture!

      Comment


        #33
        Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality



        This review has made it onto the front page of Digg now. Maybe a couple of you could add your thoughts to the Digg comments to help set the record straight.

        Comment


          #34
          Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

          Originally posted by steveybaby View Post


          This review has made it onto the front page of Digg now. Maybe a couple of you could add your thoughts to the Digg comments to help set the record straight.
          I don't know what Digg is. Do you have a link?

          Comment


            #35
            Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

            Its http://digg.com/ or direct to the article:

            http://digg.com/hardware/Vudu_Test_C...wnload_Worries

            Digg gets a *lot* of traffic - it is the 26th most popular site in the US.

            Comment


              #36
              Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

              Originally posted by steveybaby View Post
              Its http://digg.com/ or direct to the article:

              http://digg.com/hardware/Vudu_Test_C...wnload_Worries

              Digg gets a *lot* of traffic - it is the 26th most popular site in the US.
              Thanks.

              I didn't know about this site because I only look at the 25 most popular sites on the net.

              Comment


                #37
                Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                I don't see what the big deal is. Who cares. Did Vudu claim to be the next reference quality device?

                It does what is supposed to. It gives you a rental store at your house. If I want ref. material, I am going to go buy the Blu Ray version. If I want to rent something I haven't seen before and I want it now I Vudu. That is why I complianed about rentals not being available day and date. Vudu is a rental device w/ the option to buy(if you don't want reference video). If you do then buy the Blu Ray disc.

                Right now I would rank them as :

                1. Blu Ray or HD DVD
                2. Xbox 360 HD
                2. Vudu HD
                3. Vudu SD
                4. DVD
                5. Xbox 360 SD

                Nothing wrong with this at all. And even though Vudu is not first its works flawlessly when I try.

                Comment


                  #38
                  Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                  Originally posted by RobertHodge View Post
                  Thanks.

                  I didn't know about this site because I only look at the 25 most popular sites on the net.
                  The folks at Digg were just as brain dead as the Gizmodo's folks....except for steveybaby of course.

                  Comment


                    #39
                    Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                    Originally posted by Petercarbo View Post
                    Right now I would rank them as :

                    1. Blu Ray or HD DVD
                    2. Xbox 360 HD
                    2. Vudu HD
                    3. Vudu SD
                    4. DVD
                    5. Xbox 360 SD

                    Nothing wrong with this at all. And even though Vudu is not first its works flawlessly when I try.
                    I'm totally happy with Vudu too, myself I'm just trying figure out a way to wade through what's hype and reality when it comes to picture quality.

                    Other than just subjective comparision, I haven't figured out how to do that.

                    You're rating may (or may not be) correct. Unfortunately I don't have all the gear on your list to even make a subjective comparision. And I'm too scientific to take it on faith.

                    BTW you have 6 items on your list (not 5)

                    Comment


                      #40
                      Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                      Originally posted by Petercarbo View Post
                      I don't see what the big deal is. Who cares. Did Vudu claim to be the next reference quality device?

                      It does what is supposed to. It gives you a rental store at your house. If I want ref. material, I am going to go buy the Blu Ray version. If I want to rent something I haven't seen before and I want it now I Vudu. That is why I complianed about rentals not being available day and date. Vudu is a rental device w/ the option to buy(if you don't want reference video). If you do then buy the Blu Ray disc.

                      Right now I would rank them as :

                      1. Blu Ray or HD DVD
                      2. Xbox 360 HD
                      2. Vudu HD
                      3. Vudu SD
                      4. DVD
                      5. Xbox 360 SD

                      Nothing wrong with this at all. And even though Vudu is not first its works flawlessly when I try.
                      I said "what the heck" and I just rented the Transformers movie in HD from Xbox Live too.. From what I've compared so far I would definitely rank the VUDU quality above Xbox Live.
                      On the one Radar scene, the text at the bottom of the radar screen is readable on Xbox Live but it's not as easy to read as it is with VUDU HD version. The VUDU HD version is crisp and clear while the XBL version is clear but not as crisp.
                      Also in the scence where the Helecopter Transformer attacks. Right after it first attacks there are a lot of bright flashes from the lights exploding. I was surprised to see a bunch of macroblocking from the XBL version. The VUDU version didn't have this macroblocking. SO the VUDU version, at least from what I've seen, is better than the XBL version too.
                      And of course both those versions are easily better than the SD DVD or the VUDU SD version.

                      So the order should be
                      1. HD DVD/BD
                      2. VUDU HD
                      3. Xbox Live HD

                      Comment


                        #41
                        Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                        Originally posted by steveybaby View Post
                        Its http://digg.com/ or direct to the article:

                        http://digg.com/hardware/Vudu_Test_C...wnload_Worries

                        Digg gets a *lot* of traffic - it is the 26th most popular site in the US.

                        I reposted my comments from here at the Digg site, since they never publish any of my comments at Gizmodo.

                        Comment


                          #42
                          Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                          Originally posted by redwein View Post
                          I would suspect that each pixel is more than a bit. After all a bit will just specify on or off but a pixel has color, intensity, etc.
                          This is true. I don't know about the intensity, but since say a plasma is made up of three individual color tubes: red, green and blue, you could say that each pixel represents 3 bits. Now, I'm not sure if there is an intensity control for each individual color in the pixels, but if we are assuming it's on or off, then yeah, we could multiply the bit rates *3. However, there may be some intensity differences as the shading and blending of colors requires more depth than just on or off. So it's probably even higher.

                          Now, video is somewhat compressible, particularly from frame to frame with using the same background and given that the Vudu uses variable bit rate, the compression efficiency with some scenes is better than with others.

                          Comment


                            #43
                            Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                            I got a response back from Wilson, author of Giz's post (I emailed him and asked him to post his set-up here). Here's what he said:

                            Hi Ivan - I had the Vudu plugged directly into a Panasonic 1080p
                            plasma. We're not talking about a complicated rig here. Just a direct
                            connection, with the Vudu set to Automatic. I plan to do a more
                            extensive test soon, and compare Xbox 360 and Apple TV downloads, too.
                            I find it rather hard to believe that someone's download experience
                            was close to HD DVD, especially with an expensive set up.

                            Even Vudu understands this issue, that the instant delivery causes
                            significant quality loss -- the philosophical question for Vudu
                            engineers is "what's the tradeoff?" As you can see in the comments to
                            my piece, some people want slow overnight downloads of the best stuff,
                            whereas others want instant gratification. In today's broadband, it's
                            going to be a pretty solid dilemma for a while.

                            W

                            Comment


                              #44
                              Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                              Originally posted by Rusdude View Post
                              I got a response back from Wilson, author of Giz's post (I emailed him and asked him to post his set-up here). Here's what he said:
                              So it was set to automatic? For all we know it was outputting 480P/480i. I know if I run my VUDU through my Algolith Flea it thinks automatic should be set to 480i/480P even though the box can accept up to 1080P24.
                              So he needs to tell us what the actual output resolution was.
                              I know in my comparisons using 1080i output, there is a big difference between the VUDU SD and HD version. You can't confuse the two. Yet with his pictures, which also cause problems, they look similar, plus they aren't even the same frame of the movie..

                              So basically his response doesn't tell us much. We need to know the actual resolution that was being output for the SD and HD VUDU versions, and the output his HD DVD player was using.
                              Saying it was in automatic mode tells us nothing, only that the output resolution could be any of the 5 resolution choices.
                              the Plasma model would be nice too. Then we could at least find out if the model accepts 1080P24 input. If not then we know for sure the resolutin being ouput was not above 1080i, and if it was 1080i pausing it decreases the resolution even further since it can only show one of the two video fields when paused on interlaced output.

                              I wish I could post on Gizmodo but I signed up along time ago and all is says is my comments will be posted when my account is approved, but it's never been approved. So even comments I made last Summer have never shown up.

                              Comment


                                #45
                                Re: Gizmodo's Take on Vudu's HD Quality

                                It's very possible his set doesn't accept 1080p/24. So he was probably running at 1080i and taking a photo like Volker said would only potentially capture 1/2 the actual image since it's interlaced.

                                So yeah, write him back and ask him to do the tests using an actual HD setting of something like 1080p/24 or 720p.

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