Caught In The Whirlwind
Amazon Unbox?
If you haven’t heard yet, Amazon.com just released a new service for downloading movies and TV shows. Prices varry widely. TV shows generally run $1.99, movies can range anywhere from $7 to $20 for a purchase, and from $3 to $5 for a rental.
Yep…rentals. That’s the interesting part in all this to me. Instead of buying the movie outright, you can just rent something. It’s cheaper, but you need to watch the movie within 30 days of purchasing and as soon as you hit play, you have 24 hours to watch the movie before it gets deleted. It seems to me to be a great way to watch a movie you wanted to see but didn’t feel like buying the DVD for. Although, due to pricing, if you watch a lot of movies, a service like Netflix might be a better way to go. For the amount I watch though…it might be handy sometimes.
The quality of the movies are pretty good. I Bought V for Vendetta as my first movie and then rented One Hour Photo since I’ve wanted to see that anyway. Amazon says the movies are DVD quality, however, it’s just a little bit less than that. Very, very watchable. I’m willing to be a lot of people won’t be able to tell the difference between this an a DVD. The movies are about 2.2GB in size, and a lot of them (not the rentals) come with a smaller version which was compressed specifically for portable players.
I did have a few problems though. First the player itself. I sometimes have problems with the player application not connecting to amazon to download new purchases. I had to restart my computer to get it working for some reason. Also, the download speed can be kinda slow at times. For a 2GB movie file, 165KB/sec isn’t going to cut it 
It might just be because it was getting hammered with everyone trying it out. You can watch movies as they’re downloading but only after a certain amount of the file has already been downloaded.
Onto the movies. The aspect ratio listed for V for Vendetta was incorrect. It said widescreen, however the download I got was pan and scanned *shiver*. Even though One Hour Photo says it has a 5.1 soundtrack, I can’t get it to play anything except 2 channel stereo, but I’m still trying And I’m not sure if it’s just due to the DRM on One Hour Photo, but I can’t skip to a certain time in the movie. You hit play and watch it straight through…if you close it in the middle, it won’t remember your spot so you have to watch it all the way back through again. I noticed V for Vendetta allowed me to skip to wherever I wanted. Maybe it’s just a rental thing.
Anyway, it looks pretty interesting to me with some reasonable prices for what they’re giving you. It’ll be cool to see how things end up down the line since all of this stuff is still very early adopter. I’m probably not going to use it much, but I can see myself renting an ocasional movie
UPDATE: This was written before I found out that it installs a service that runs all the time and phones home to Amazon a couple times a day. BAD software. BAD!
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jason on September 8, 2006 at 9:28 am, and is filed under Uncategorized. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
