Hi everyone,
New Vudu user here. For tl;dr version, scroll all the way to the bottom and just read the last paragraph.
I've been a long-time user of many DVR and streaming options (XBMC, Windows Media Center, Plex, TiVo, Apple TV, etc.), and have a large collections of movies I own which I have available on my home server. I've grown increasingly tired of having to go through the whole ripping process, storing them, dealing with various glitches here and there. I also had one of my hard drives fail a while ago which was a bummer since it meant that I lost about 50 movies I had ripped, so I had to go and re-rip those all over again.
Couple that with the fact that on "movie night" my wife seldomly wants to watch something we already own and instead wants to watch something new (usually via Apple TV / iTunes).
This got me to wondering if the whole ripping process was worth the effort and maintaining multiple hard drives connected to my server. Maybe I should just rent most of the time and only buy movies (and buy them digitally) when I really, really, really know that it's something that I'll watch several times.
When these "buy-digital" approaches were new, the pros/cons didn't add up well for me: Prices were high, DRM sucks, and what happened if the service you chose to buy from went bankrupt or you switched from an Apple device to some other ecosystem (or vice versa)? I'd hate to buy 500 movies on iTunes and later find that I wanted to switch to Android or whatever and wouldn't be able to play them. But my first taste of UV was negative. The initial setup process seemed far clunkier than Apple's and using Vudu on my Blu-ray player felt clunky, too.
Flash forward to the last couple of weeks. I was an early TiVo adopter who used it happily for many years but switched to Windows Media Center for a few years, and just recently decided to switch back to TiVo (Roamio Plus). I was thinking again about the "buy digital" approach since I had noticed more recently that there were some decent sales (via iTunes, Amazon, and VUDU) every so often on some movies I liked. The idea of having *one* device (my TiVo) to do *everything* and not have to switch inputs to do different thingsto use for everything With TiVo I had a couple of options: VUDU and Amazon. There were some rumors about Amazon joining UV, so that got me to look into UV again, which then led me to take another look at VUDU. I was excited when I saw their in-home "disc to digital" feature, and the 50% off promo made it even more compelling.
So I started experimenting with VUDU yesterday. I had a couple of Blu-rays which came with digital copy codes that I never used, so I tried those out. I learned that Disney had its own approach but that VUDU had a partnership with them, so it wasn't too much of a hassle. The only other snag I ran into was that a couple of those "digital copy" codes I had were from an older digital copy approach that didn't seem to be redeemable under the newer UVU or Disney approaches.
I was fairly happy with the overall usability, genre filtering, etc. of the VUDU UI on my TiVo and the PQ looked good. I should add that TiVo's support of 24Hz was a big plus for me (I'm assuming/hoping that the source material fed from VUDU to the TiVo really *is* 24Hz). The VUDU app on the TiVo is an Opera app and it certainly feels like a web app, which isn't a great thing, but it isn't horrible. My main complaint is probably that I had some SD movies in my collection which I have no idea how they got there and I don't want to even see them show up, but there's no way to hide them (I believe I read that I can email VUDU and ask them to delete them from my collection, but I'd prefer to hide them and not totally delete them, just in case I ever wanted to access them in the future).
So I've seen enough that I think I want to take the next step and shell out some money to convert a bunch of my movies to HDX. I figured I'd start out by converting 10 movies to take advantage of the 50% off promo and then actually watch a couple of movies from beginning to end to make sure the usability and PQ are good enough for my standards (I should mention that my living room has an Epson 8350 front projector and very large 2.35:1 screen).
I haven't downloaded the disc-to-digital app yet, but I did go through the search process to make sure all/most of my movies are available. I was mostly happy to find most of my movies, but was disappointed to find that there were several MGM movies that were not, along with all of the more recent Marvel movies, and no Disney movies. It appears that there is no disc-to-digital option through Disney, either, so I guess I'm out of luck there.
One other thing that still concerns me a bit: It's my understanding that when you start storing your movie purchases in the cloud, you're at the whim of the licensing deals that these guys (VUDU/UVU/Studios) have in place. I think I've seen it written that a studio might decide to sever their relationship with UVU (or perhaps just VUDU?), either overall or perhaps even just for a particular movie, and you could lose access to that movie. So, my question is: Has that ever *actually* happened yet for any movies? Are there any actual examples where someone has purchased a movie through VUDU and that movie later became unavailable to watch for the person who purchased it?
New Vudu user here. For tl;dr version, scroll all the way to the bottom and just read the last paragraph.
I've been a long-time user of many DVR and streaming options (XBMC, Windows Media Center, Plex, TiVo, Apple TV, etc.), and have a large collections of movies I own which I have available on my home server. I've grown increasingly tired of having to go through the whole ripping process, storing them, dealing with various glitches here and there. I also had one of my hard drives fail a while ago which was a bummer since it meant that I lost about 50 movies I had ripped, so I had to go and re-rip those all over again.
Couple that with the fact that on "movie night" my wife seldomly wants to watch something we already own and instead wants to watch something new (usually via Apple TV / iTunes).
This got me to wondering if the whole ripping process was worth the effort and maintaining multiple hard drives connected to my server. Maybe I should just rent most of the time and only buy movies (and buy them digitally) when I really, really, really know that it's something that I'll watch several times.
When these "buy-digital" approaches were new, the pros/cons didn't add up well for me: Prices were high, DRM sucks, and what happened if the service you chose to buy from went bankrupt or you switched from an Apple device to some other ecosystem (or vice versa)? I'd hate to buy 500 movies on iTunes and later find that I wanted to switch to Android or whatever and wouldn't be able to play them. But my first taste of UV was negative. The initial setup process seemed far clunkier than Apple's and using Vudu on my Blu-ray player felt clunky, too.
Flash forward to the last couple of weeks. I was an early TiVo adopter who used it happily for many years but switched to Windows Media Center for a few years, and just recently decided to switch back to TiVo (Roamio Plus). I was thinking again about the "buy digital" approach since I had noticed more recently that there were some decent sales (via iTunes, Amazon, and VUDU) every so often on some movies I liked. The idea of having *one* device (my TiVo) to do *everything* and not have to switch inputs to do different thingsto use for everything With TiVo I had a couple of options: VUDU and Amazon. There were some rumors about Amazon joining UV, so that got me to look into UV again, which then led me to take another look at VUDU. I was excited when I saw their in-home "disc to digital" feature, and the 50% off promo made it even more compelling.
So I started experimenting with VUDU yesterday. I had a couple of Blu-rays which came with digital copy codes that I never used, so I tried those out. I learned that Disney had its own approach but that VUDU had a partnership with them, so it wasn't too much of a hassle. The only other snag I ran into was that a couple of those "digital copy" codes I had were from an older digital copy approach that didn't seem to be redeemable under the newer UVU or Disney approaches.
I was fairly happy with the overall usability, genre filtering, etc. of the VUDU UI on my TiVo and the PQ looked good. I should add that TiVo's support of 24Hz was a big plus for me (I'm assuming/hoping that the source material fed from VUDU to the TiVo really *is* 24Hz). The VUDU app on the TiVo is an Opera app and it certainly feels like a web app, which isn't a great thing, but it isn't horrible. My main complaint is probably that I had some SD movies in my collection which I have no idea how they got there and I don't want to even see them show up, but there's no way to hide them (I believe I read that I can email VUDU and ask them to delete them from my collection, but I'd prefer to hide them and not totally delete them, just in case I ever wanted to access them in the future).
So I've seen enough that I think I want to take the next step and shell out some money to convert a bunch of my movies to HDX. I figured I'd start out by converting 10 movies to take advantage of the 50% off promo and then actually watch a couple of movies from beginning to end to make sure the usability and PQ are good enough for my standards (I should mention that my living room has an Epson 8350 front projector and very large 2.35:1 screen).
I haven't downloaded the disc-to-digital app yet, but I did go through the search process to make sure all/most of my movies are available. I was mostly happy to find most of my movies, but was disappointed to find that there were several MGM movies that were not, along with all of the more recent Marvel movies, and no Disney movies. It appears that there is no disc-to-digital option through Disney, either, so I guess I'm out of luck there.
One other thing that still concerns me a bit: It's my understanding that when you start storing your movie purchases in the cloud, you're at the whim of the licensing deals that these guys (VUDU/UVU/Studios) have in place. I think I've seen it written that a studio might decide to sever their relationship with UVU (or perhaps just VUDU?), either overall or perhaps even just for a particular movie, and you could lose access to that movie. So, my question is: Has that ever *actually* happened yet for any movies? Are there any actual examples where someone has purchased a movie through VUDU and that movie later became unavailable to watch for the person who purchased it?
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