Fool's Gold

[kikar]

I don't know if this is the right place to post (if not feel free to move it)...

I received an email from WB the other day advertising the movie "Fool's Gold" with the slogan "watch it your way" on DVD, BD, and On Demand. It listed the Online providers of which Vudu is one. I checked on AppleTV and it was there, I checked Xbox Marketplace and it was there, but when I check Vudu it says available soon. Any idea how soon "available soon" is? My wife really wants to see this movie and I really want to see it on Vudu.

[PrasannaG]

Re: Fool's Gold

We apologize for the delay in publishing the movie. The movie has a lot of scenes with flowing water, and we had to work extra-hard to optimize the video quality in these scenes, resulting in a publishing delay. The movie should be available on the service this weekend.

[redwein]

Re: Fool's Gold

I never realized you had to do movie specific encoding work. I just assumed that it was run through a program that spit out the Vudu encoding.

[kikar]

Re: Fool's Gold

Sweet. Thanks for the reply. I would much prefer to wait than to have a rushed encode. So far you guys haven't let me down with your transfers.

[HeadHodge]

Re: Fool's Gold

I never realized you had to do movie specific encoding work. I just assumed that it was run through a program that spit out the Vudu encoding.

That's what I would have thought too.

Maybe they need to get a faster PC for their encoding in order to keep up with the fast moving scenes.

Another thought I just had. I purchased my own H.264 encoder a few weeks ago, just to play with it and try to figure out how it works.

With the one I have, the encoder is setup with a slew of encoding options. After you set the options, you then endcode the content. To encode a 90 minute movie takes quite awhile.

So my theory is that maybe they are encoding the movie then afterwards visually reviewing the movie or using some sort of analysis tool to rate the encoded quality.

Since they probably start at the lowest bit-rate they think would produce acceptable quality, after reviewing the result, they weren't happy with the result. So then they would have to up the bit rate and re-encode it again.

If they have to re-encode serveral times to get the right bit-rate vs quality, I could see this process taking quite a bit of time to re-encode the whole movie each time they make a change.

Just a thought.....

(PrasnnaG would know the real answer, but I'll bet he's not going to tell us)

[kikar]

Re: Fool's Gold

Just want to say that I watched this last night, and I have to say you guys did an excellent job with the transfer. It looked fantastic for SD. This is a title I will use to show off Vudu's Standard definition side ( I use the Bourne movies to show off the HD).

[NA9D]

Re: Fool's Gold

So my theory is that maybe they are encoding the movie then afterwards visually reviewing the movie or using some sort of analysis tool to rate the encoded quality.

I know that Vudu has engineers that review every single movie for quality. They don't necessarily watch them at 1x speed but every movie is gone through to make sure there's no major issues.

That said, keep in mind that the Vudu uses VBR Encoding (variable bit rate) and so they may need to optimize the VBR algorithm for every different kind of content. Water is similar to black in that it appears to be a fairly homogenous color. In reality it isn't and you could get a lot of banding or blocking if it isn't encoded properly...

[Rusdude]

Re: Fool's Gold

Encoding is a very complicated process. Even for Blu-Ray movies, where you'd think space wouldn't be an issue, they have to play around with settings/rates to get everything just right.