Hey everyone, Brian here, guest editor for Jon4Lakers.com and this is a continuation of the video series on the Vudu Set-top-box.
Now, on this video, we’re going to talk about the setup of the device and then we’re going to actually go over the remote because this is one of the strangest, smallest, weirdest looking remotes that they make for any set-top-box so we are going to talk about whether it’s actually a usable remote and then we are going to go to the whole menu system of the Vudu box and that will show you what it’s like to pick a movie, to download a movie and then to watch a movie and all the other stuff that goes along with that so I’ll see you in a second.
Alright guys, so here we are done on my setup here and as you can see the Vudu box is a nice looking attractive device. It doesn’t take up much room so it’s about two or three inches high here. It matches nicely if you have black components or sliver components like I do and let me turn it around but first I want to point out two things to you. These lights on the side, the one on the left is a standby light, it turns kind of orange when it’s not on. And then the green light is your network light so when you have a network connection going, it will stay green. It will turn red if your network goes offline or something like that. So, let’s turn it around.
Alright so let me get a little bit closer here. Okay so here we are a little bit closer. Now, this is the antenna. And what is great about the remote is that it doesn’t use—it uses Radio frequency so you can be behind the couch or you know on the stairs or kind of faraway from your Vudu box and still have it work quite well. So, that’s really great. Here is how I have it connected. I have it with my optical audio cable going to my receiver down here and then I’ve got the HDMI going to the TV up there and the Ethernet cable of course and to the right of that is the power cable so really not that many connectors that’s involved here as you would expect with the set-top-box.
Okay. So, I want to talk about the remote right now. Now, the remote only has five buttons. So, we have a power button, back button, play/pause button, a Vudu button which goes to the home screen and a more button so you’re probably wondering and of course it’s a scroll wheel. You’re probably wondering how can you operate a set-top-box, how you search for movies with just five buttons like this. Well, I tell you what, it’s very easy. The scroll wheel really comes in handy when you are flipping through letters or trying to find various titles in their catalog. And what’s great about the remote is it’s completely ergonomic so you kind of hold the remote like this, you put your thumb on the scroll wheel and your hand just wraps gently around it and it’s perfect for right or left handers.
One of the problems with the remote is that it is dark so if the lights are off, you’re not going to see the buttons too well and they’re not backlit so you can’t tell what button you’re heading. So, let’s say you probably have to memorize where the buttons are and it’s not that big of a deal considering that there are only five buttons and a scroll wheel. Alright guys so here we are on the Vudu main menu, and you get this when you turn on your device, when you turn on the box and also when you press the Vudu button on the remote control. Now, there are so many ins and outs of this and it would probably take me an hour to show you everything but I really want to give you an idea for the experience that you can expect to have with the Vudu player on how long it takes to get from screen to screen, what is like to buy a movie and there are two kinds of components of the Vudu box that I am going to show you. One is movies, how to download a movie and watch a movie and the other one is a Vudu labs section which lets you go to YouTube, Flickr Picasa. It’s kind of a new experimental project that really brings a ton of content to the Vudu box. I think it’s one of the ways that the Vudu box stands above other set-top-boxes out there.
So anyway, this is your main screen. You can flip through the featured titles here quite easily with the scroll wheel but I want to go to explore catalog because I want to download a movie right now. I’m going to search by title over here and I am going to type hawk for the Incredible Hawk and what it does is it searches as you type and well, it came up pretty fast actually. On the left there, you will see the list of matches and right at the top is the Incredible Hawk so I’m going to click on that one and it will take me to the information screen. And this is what you get. On the right in the upper right, you get a synopsis. Below that, you get information playtime, rating year, that sort of thing, genre. Below that, it tells you the formats that it’s available and now this is kind of important especially if you have a high definition box. You have standard definition which is kind of crappy. You have HD which is probably around 10ATI, maybe 720p then you have the HDX which is the top of the top 10 ATP completely uncompressed so the audio is fantastic, very discreet channels, the pictures are incredible. It’s not quite blu-ray but it’s almost blu-ray.
So, let’s say I want to do the HDX so I want to do over here on the left you see where the selection box is. I’m going to do rent from 399 and it‘s going to show me the three different prices depending on what I want. The HDX is 599 for a 24-hour rental period. This is kind of in a higher end of the price. Usually, they’re about 499 but the Incredible Hawk is just out so it’s price tire. So, if I click on it, it says “Rent for 599 and it will be available in two hours.” I know what you are thinking, “Two hours, are you kidding me? I don’t want to wait two hours.” Well, here is the thing. The HDX videos are so big that even over a high speed line, it takes a long time to download. That said, if you want to get the HD version, it will start immediately. And simultaneously, if you want to have the HDX version download, you can go to any other movie in their catalog and start watching it immediately. Let me demonstrate that.
So, let’s go to the grinch—let’s start watching it in and you can’t rent this one. It looks like it’s not out. Let’s do this movie and rent and I am going to choose HD, ready to watch and watch how fast this is. It’s going to come up on the screen probably in about 10 seconds eventhough I am downloading a BTX title at the same time so watch now.
And here we are, the movies are already starting while I am downloading a BTX title so it’s really amazing how fast this all works and how easy and intuitive it is. So, if we go back to the main screen and we go to my Vudu, we can kind of see our rentals right now and what’s being downloaded. Some would go to my rentals and it shows me these are all the movies that I have been watching lately. We have the Incredible Hawk right here and it’s in download queue. There is another movie that’s in the download queue. And when it is done, the hawk will start downloading.
Okay so that was movies on the Vudu player. The movie experience on the Vudu player is fantastic. It’s one of the best that I’ve ever seen on any set-top-box. The movies are quickly available. The download, the selection is pretty darn good. It’s not perfect. I have run into some movies that aren’t available to download yet but Vudu is a startup company. They’re starting to bring on more and more titles all the time.
Okay so let’s go into the next section of this, Vudu labs, this is a new thing. This kind of brings a whole new room of content to your Vudu box and I think it’s really important. Okay and we can do a few things here. Hopefully you can see this. We can do YouTube, we can do on demand TV, look at G4TV, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, a lot of that kind of stuff TV channels that you watch on your regular channel. Then we have Picasa, let’s do Picasa because what you can do is actually log into your account if you have Picasa online and you can flick through all of your pictures so this is a demo. And it kind of shows you movie course while you’re waiting so you don’t get bored, but well, looking at pictures on an LCD television is amazing they are coming up right now. And this is kind of the demo that comes on the Vudu box.
And so imagine you’ve just uploaded some pictures to Picasa and you are doing a slideshow for your family or friends, pretty cool stuff. Alright, let’s go back.
And let’s go to YouTube, you can watch every YouTube video that is on youtube.com so I am going to go to—I am going to search fro Jon4Lakers, it bring up the Jon4Lakers channel, Jon4Lakers and hopefully get one of Jon’s videos on the screen, Jon4 and that should be enough, done. There is one right here, Lon4Lakers. And let’s go more from the author so we can get the Jon4Lakers YouTube channel right on the screen. Here are all Jon’s videos so here is the man himself and we can play it full screen. It’s loading and takes just a second.
And of course the sound I off right now and what’s really great is that I can leave Jon on the right side of my screen while I browse his other videos or even go through the rest of YouTube so a really great interface for YuoTube from Vudu labs. So, let’s move on from here.
Okay so let’s go to On Demand TV. There is a lot of different content here. So, we can go to signs and technology. We’ve got David Pogue from the Ne York Times, we’ve got Walt Mossberg from the Wallstreet Journal, we’ve got—in National Geographic and it’s all really good quality. Some of it is HD, some of it is SD but it all works really well and you know 10 seconds or less two to watch it on the screen. And here it is. So, you could spend a really long time if you never downloaded any movies at all just in the Vudu lab section of Vudu and there’s also some games on here which is kind of fun. You can play Freecell, there’s one called a cooper which allows you to shot down—and that sort of thing.
So guys I know it was a long video but I hope I gave you a really good feel for how the Vudu player works with you and kind of the experience that it will bring you. In the next video, we’re going to cover kind of the pros and the cons, wrap it all up and it will tell if this is something that you should buy and kind of give you an overall opinion on it. So that’s it for now. See you soon.
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