Re: Vudu Image Quality Issues
My apologies for what I thought was an obvious exageration of a poor quality source. I have only seen YouTube once and gave it up because of the awful quality. Vudu is not YouTube quality, but it is still far below DVD or hi-res source.
The Kuro is configured according to the very detailed parameters on a thread on AVS. It works extremely well with the Samsung hi-res player. It supports 1080P natively.
I played around last night, watching Bourne HD and also Elizabeth SD. I find the quality to be acceptable (heavy contouring but reasonable detail) in HD and unacceptable in SD. I tried setting Vudu to 1080I and it made no substantial difference. I adjusted the Kuro parameters and nothing came up better than the original set. The menuing screens of Vudu look fabulous. I honestly do not believe that it is the Kuro at fault here.
I do not think of myself as a videophile, though I was an early adopter of LaserDisc back when. I love film and find that the poor quality takes away my involvement in the story.
As I said in my original post, I think this is a Vudu issue due to bit rate compression. I had not looked into this enough before I bought the product based on my expectation that by streaming and caching Vudu would offer a high quality than compressed streaming video - close or equal to DVD. I think that is not the case and I would guess that Vudu is close in bit rate to other streaming video, perhaps including cable (I do not have any TV sources to know).
I appreciate your comments and suggestions. They have made it clear that this is not a flaw in the hardware or configuration. I think Vudu is a great service with terrific interface and usability. It is not what I thought it was, so this is, ultimately, a matter of buyer's regret. No problem - I will put it into the guest bedroom on a 42" LCD where the artifacts will not be so visible. Thank you all.
My apologies for what I thought was an obvious exageration of a poor quality source. I have only seen YouTube once and gave it up because of the awful quality. Vudu is not YouTube quality, but it is still far below DVD or hi-res source.
The Kuro is configured according to the very detailed parameters on a thread on AVS. It works extremely well with the Samsung hi-res player. It supports 1080P natively.
I played around last night, watching Bourne HD and also Elizabeth SD. I find the quality to be acceptable (heavy contouring but reasonable detail) in HD and unacceptable in SD. I tried setting Vudu to 1080I and it made no substantial difference. I adjusted the Kuro parameters and nothing came up better than the original set. The menuing screens of Vudu look fabulous. I honestly do not believe that it is the Kuro at fault here.
I do not think of myself as a videophile, though I was an early adopter of LaserDisc back when. I love film and find that the poor quality takes away my involvement in the story.
As I said in my original post, I think this is a Vudu issue due to bit rate compression. I had not looked into this enough before I bought the product based on my expectation that by streaming and caching Vudu would offer a high quality than compressed streaming video - close or equal to DVD. I think that is not the case and I would guess that Vudu is close in bit rate to other streaming video, perhaps including cable (I do not have any TV sources to know).
I appreciate your comments and suggestions. They have made it clear that this is not a flaw in the hardware or configuration. I think Vudu is a great service with terrific interface and usability. It is not what I thought it was, so this is, ultimately, a matter of buyer's regret. No problem - I will put it into the guest bedroom on a 42" LCD where the artifacts will not be so visible. Thank you all.
decent. But It's SD and in general SD sucks since there is no detail in the image, whether from a DVD or broadcast SD. There is no detail compared to HD broadcasts. The HD from VUDU easily has much more detail than the SD DVDs. ANd I rank VUDU HD above broadcast HD quality because you don't get macroblocking like with all HD over broadcast TV. I've been watching HD since 2001, and broadcast TV always has macroblocking from bright flashes, fast movement and quick camera pans. While there is very litltle of this with VUDU HD that I have have watched. Plus I run my VUDU and broadcast sources through an Algolith HDMI flea(and a VP50pro) which does a good job reducing macroblocking, but I can still easily see it in almost every broadcast program I watch while i don't see it very often in the VUDU HD programming I've watched.
It's cool. Wish I had the money to buy something like that.....
Comment