Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

[CT-Scott]

I've just fairly recently started using VUDU. I had bought a TiVo Roamio about a month or so ago and when I found out that VUDU on the TiVo supported 24Hz/fps, I was excited about that.

But one thing that I've always appreciated about iTunes movies on the Apple TV as compared to Netflix, for example, is that when you start "streaming" an iTunes movie from the cloud, it actually starts downloading it into the local storage of the Apple TV (the 2nd and 3rd gen models have 8GB of storage). The logic behind the scenes will attempt to make an intelligent decision as to when it's safe to start playing the movie so that you don't run into a situation where the movie is playing back faster than than your internet speed can download it. So, if you have a slower internet connection, it might make you wait 5 minutes or longer (could be quite a bit longer) before it will start playing it.

My internet speed is quite fast, so I never have to wait, and with Netflix and VUDU, I feel pretty confident that the movie should stream at the best quality level. But where I worry is that there's always a possibility of a *temporary* drop in network speed. With something like Netflix, I believe that this will result in the picture quality of the movie I'm watching being degraded. Whereas with the Apple TV, a large enough chunk of the movie will already be in the buffer storage that a temporary drop in network speed will have no impact. If the network speed is poor for an extended period of time, there may be a risk that the movie pauses and I see a spinning disc while it attempts to download more into the buffer, but I'm not worried about that scenario.

So, how does VUDU work on the TiVo? The TiVo has plenty of on-board hard drive storage. It would be great if VUDU on the TiVo was smart enough to make use of that storage and essentially download on-the-fly a movie I'm watching to that storage and essentially "force" the movie bitrate to remain at the highest quality. Unfortunately, I suspect that's not how it works, and that it works more like Netflix, where a temporary drop in internet speed may result in the picture quality being temporarily degraded.

Can one of the VUDU techies verify how VUDU works on the TiVo?

[Jake]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

I've just fairly recently started using VUDU. I had bought a TiVo Roamio about a month or so ago and when I found out that VUDU on the TiVo supported 24Hz/fps, I was excited about that.

But one thing that I've always appreciated about iTunes movies on the Apple TV as compared to Netflix, for example, is that when you start "streaming" an iTunes movie from the cloud, it actually starts downloading it into the local storage of the Apple TV (the 2nd and 3rd gen models have 8GB of storage). The logic behind the scenes will attempt to make an intelligent decision as to when it's safe to start playing the movie so that you don't run into a situation where the movie is playing back faster than than your internet speed can download it. So, if you have a slower internet connection, it might make you wait 5 minutes or longer (could be quite a bit longer) before it will start playing it.

My internet speed is quite fast, so I never have to wait, and with Netflix and VUDU, I feel pretty confident that the movie should stream at the best quality level. But where I worry is that there's always a possibility of a *temporary* drop in network speed. With something like Netflix, I believe that this will result in the picture quality of the movie I'm watching being degraded. Whereas with the Apple TV, a large enough chunk of the movie will already be in the buffer storage that a temporary drop in network speed will have no impact. If the network speed is poor for an extended period of time, there may be a risk that the movie pauses and I see a spinning disc while it attempts to download more into the buffer, but I'm not worried about that scenario.

So, how does VUDU work on the TiVo? The TiVo has plenty of on-board hard drive storage. It would be great if VUDU on the TiVo was smart enough to make use of that storage and essentially download on-the-fly a movie I'm watching to that storage and essentially "force" the movie bitrate to remain at the highest quality. Unfortunately, I suspect that's not how it works, and that it works more like Netflix, where a temporary drop in internet speed may result in the picture quality being temporarily degraded.

Can one of the VUDU techies verify how VUDU works on the TiVo?

VUDU on Tivo does not support downloads. It's up to Tivo if they want to support that.

[CT-Scott]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Thanks for the reply Jake. Just to clarify, I'm not really wanting to download and store (long term) VUDU movies on my TiVo. I was just hoping that the VUDU app for the TiVo would take advantage of the TiVo's storage space and allow some sort of buffering of the streamed movie so as to prevent temporary drops in picture quality if/when the internet speed takes a temporary hit.

Can you confirm, then, that the VUDU client software *never* does any sort of buffering into temporary storage on any platform?

[satam55]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Thanks for the reply Jake. Just to clarify, I'm not really wanting to download and store (long term) VUDU movies on my TiVo. I was just hoping that the VUDU app for the TiVo would take advantage of the TiVo's storage space and allow some sort of buffering of the streamed movie so as to prevent temporary drops in picture quality if/when the internet speed takes a temporary hit.

Can you confirm, then, that the VUDU client software *never* does any sort of buffering into temporary storage on any platform?

CT-Scott if you want to consider another device, The VUDU app on the PS3 allows you to download movies & TV show episodes to local storage. It even allows you to start watching while it downloads in the background.

The PS3 VUDU app is 1 of the few VUDU apps (If not the only 1) on a device meant to be hooked up to a TV that supports downloads. So the PS3 VUDU app probably has the best VUDU experience.

[CT-Scott]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

satam55, that's good to know. Two of the things I really like about the TiVo, though, is that:
a) It allows me to have "one device" to handle just about everything I need to do (TV/DVR, Netflix, Amazon Prime, movie rentals/purchases thru VUDU).
b) It supports 24Hz/fps.

VUDU doesn't seem to maintain a definitive list of which devices support 24Hz, but based on the Googling I've done, it seems like only TiVo, the WDTV Live, and maybe some Blu-ray players and TVs support it.

And just to clarify again, my internet speed is great. But temporary glitches and drops in speed can happen and I worry a little about any streaming format that is susceptible to PQ degradation, audio drop-outs, etc., when those types of things happen. So I'm just trying to clarify what sort of buffering (not downloading) the VUDU apps on various platforms can handle. It sounds like it doesn't have *any* buffering capability (is that correct?) and the closest thing to it is something like the PS3 which will do full downloading but allow immediate playback (while the download is still in progress).

So, the PS3 approach is similar to the Apple TV approach, but does that mean that *all* other VUDU players are susceptible to drops in PQ and audio drop-outs when the network speed takes even a very brief hit?

Again, I'm curious from a technical perspective what VUDU's "minimum requirements" for streamers is. Do they even require that any streamer have some bare minimum of RAM for buffer usage (like 256MB) to at least account for extremely brief drops in network speed? Or will even the briefest of speed drops be immediately noticeable to someone watching a movie?

Another related technical question: What is the time duration threshhold that the VUDU app will use to determine if it needs to shift from using the highest quality bitrate to a lower-quality bitrate? To elaborate...if I've got great internet speed and the movie starts out at the highest quality level, and my internet speed drops for just one second, will VUDU ignore that minor speed bump and continue to serve me the highest quality bitrate stream? Or will the VUDU app interpret even that one-second drop in speed as a signal to start serving me a lower-bitrate stream? What exactly is that number (in terms of seconds) when the VUDU software decides that the network speed is not offering a sustained "fast enough" connection to serve me the highest bitrate stream? Is it 1 second? 2 seconds? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? And once it decides to switch me to a lower quality stream, if my internet speed improves again, how long does it take the VUDU software to notice that and switch me back to the highest quality stream? Those are the kind of technical details I'd really like to know.

[Jake]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Thanks for the reply Jake. Just to clarify, I'm not really wanting to download and store (long term) VUDU movies on my TiVo. I was just hoping that the VUDU app for the TiVo would take advantage of the TiVo's storage space and allow some sort of buffering of the streamed movie so as to prevent temporary drops in picture quality if/when the internet speed takes a temporary hit.

Can you confirm, then, that the VUDU client software *never* does any sort of buffering into temporary storage on any platform?

As stated, few devices store to disk, but all devices to have a significant RAM buffer to prevent pauses for buffering. And yes, depending on how much of the stream is buffered it may not switch to lower rates immediately. Can't really go into details except to say it's always a compromise between the highest video quality and preventing buffering pauses.

[CT-Scott]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

OK thanks, Jake. So getting back to my specific use case of the TiVo...It sounds like you're saying that it *does* do some amount of memory-based buffering to prevent both degradation of video quality and pauses when the drop in internet speed is extremely brief, correct?

[Jake]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

OK thanks, Jake. So getting back to my specific use case of the TiVo...It sounds like you're saying that it *does* do some amount of memory-based buffering to prevent both degradation of video quality and pauses when the drop in internet speed is extremely brief, correct?

Yes, in RAM. And depending on the stream bitrate it's not even necessarily brief... if the buffer is completely fillsed for an SD stream you could probably unplug your router for a minute or more and not notice...

[ColiBreh1]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

As stated, few devices store to disk, but all devices to have a significant RAM buffer to prevent pauses for buffering. And yes, depending on how much of the stream is buffered it may not switch to lower rates immediately. Can't really go into details except to say it's always a compromise between the highest video quality and preventing buffering pauses.

Can we get a complete list of devices with Vudu apps that allows you to download to the HDD? That's kind of important.

[Jake]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Can we get a complete list of devices with Vudu apps that allows you to download to the HDD? That's kind of important.

AFAIK for devices (vs mobile/PC) the PS3 is the only one that is still being sold. The others (LG BD590, WD Live, original VUDU box, maybe a couple others?) are no longer sold.

The problem is that the manufacturers of most of the popular devices with HDDs (game consoles, DVRs) don't want to give up an arbitrarily large amount of space to a 3rd party app (this is why PS4 doesn't support download, either - it's limited to 1GB app space which isn't even enough to download an SD movie). Not much VUDU can do in that case.

[ColiBreh1]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Can we get a complete list of devices with Vudu apps that allows you to download to the HDD? That's kind of important.

AFAIK for devices (vs mobile/PC) the PS3 is the only one that is still being sold. The others (LG BD590, WD Live, original VUDU box, maybe a couple others?) are no longer sold.

The problem is that the manufacturers of most of the popular devices with HDDs (game consoles, DVRs) don't want to give up an arbitrarily large amount of space to a 3rd party app (this is why PS4 doesn't support download, either - it's limited to 1GB app space which isn't even enough to download an SD movie). Not much VUDU can do in that case.

Just to be sure. Are you specially talking about the WD Live device with a built-in HDD (Called "WD TV Live Hub")?

[tsken02]

Re: Is VUDU on the TiVo smart enough to use local storage?

Just to be sure. Are you specially talking about the WD Live device with a built-in HDD (Called "WD TV Live Hub")?

Yes, the TV Live Hub can download movies from Vudu. It comes with a 1 TB hard drive. I have one if there's something you'd like to know. It's not been updated since 2013, but it still works for me. Some of the services have since been discontinued, so don't count on the advertising.

It does require a speedy Internet connection to watch the movies, even though you have them on the local drive. Stupid requirement, but at least you don't need to stream kids movies over and over, wasting your cap.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/update...dfwdtv_livehub