KALEIDESCAPE OFFERS INDUSTRY’S FIRST INTERNET DELIVERY OF MOVIES THAT MATCH BLU-RAY & DVD DISCS - Page 2

Brian, I was thinking the exact same thing about the bitrate.

HDX is very nice but my Panasonic BD player sports Amazon and we use it time-by-time and I would argue it's just as good if not better quality... now if you try to get the same on a PC that's a different story, I don't know why but Amazon's PC streaming does not look half as good as their appliance-based HD stream (not to mention the lack of 5.1 sound on PC.)

Lack of bandwidth. I've seen it with Amazon, Vudu etc when I was running around ~15Mbit - now on 30Mbit I have no issues with anything. People often don't realize how much bandwidth they are using, even just in an average household of 2-3 Android phones, a laptop plus couple of tablet connected... if you want to stream movies in excellent quality you need to step up from the entry-level 10Mb or shut off your devices, period.

I'm not sure if I buy that. This was on a 20 mb/s Fios connection late at night with no one else using the internet. Vudu indicated full bars (and HDX) throughout the movie. Vudu also says directly on their website that HDX requires a 4.5 mb/s internet connection. That might also explain the poor quality, considering blu-ray go upwards of 40 mb/s. I know these services use some fancy compression algorithms, but there's only so much compression you can hide.

My results from Vudu's internet test:
Download Speed: 19015 kbps (19 Mbps)
Upload Speed: 4151 kbps (4.2 Mbps)

From my experience, download and upload speeds on Fios are extremely reliable.
Edited by lockdown571 - 12/19/12 at 6:36pm

Huh? That's over 500 mega[/b]bytes[/b] per sec...

Keep in mind lack of bandwidth isn't necessarily limited to your end - things can happen on the way to you... also these streaming services have monitoring and will quickly throttle down the codec if something happens.

Obviously I meant 4500 kbps as per the link. Also, i can't help if things go wrong on the way to me. I'm not even sure what that means. I don't have any issues sustaining a 20 mb/s download speed from other websites with a high enough upload speed. Why would vudu have so much trouble? Regardless, it's out of my hands and just shows that existing streaming services can't replace blu-ray, even if you do have a fast and reliable internet provider.

I watched another HDX movie on Vudu today, The Bourne Legacy. HDX the whole time with full bars. This time it was on a 42" Kuro, and the difference was less pronounced. Still, clearly, this is not blu-ray quality. Compared to other streaming services like Netflix, the quality is excellent, but there's still a bit of softness, most noticeable on people's faces.

Hopefully Kaleidescape's will improve in this regard, but unfortunately the price will probably be prohibitive for most.

Really? Maybe on paper.

Since I don't buy BR movies, only rent via Netflix which seems to be a dying business model, I am hoping that the rental server model will become more popular to download movies rather than stream. I have invested a modest amount in a hd pj with a scope screen in a dedicated darkened room and having the best possible PQ makes the whole adventure worth it.  Many posters/reviewers have commented that Vudu HDX doesn't look as good as BR and they don't have the higher audio resolution of dts ma/dd thd, which I really enjoy over the lower rez audio.

 

One glimmer of hope lies in the Red Player server for 4K movies. Hopefully it will have a rental avenue rather than purchase only, and it appears priced at around $1000 to some say $1400, a whole lot less than Kaledioscope and at 4K resolution, which of course will need a 4K display to really appreciate the difference from 1080p.  Sony also is touting a 4K server model for its new 4K displays, but I haven't seen any pricing but I' m sure it's way less than the Kaledioscope.

I'm pretty sure that this service simply downloads the full DVD or Blu-ray disc image. It makes sense, since the players are already designed to play DVD/Blu-ray images ripped from an actual disc.

Right now the service is in beta and only offering "DVD" quality, not Blu-ray:
https://store.kaleidescape.com/help
Looking at one of the "DVD quality" downloads available, The Dark Knight Rises, shows that it's 8.4GB in size:
https://store.kaleidescape.com/movies/details/16689761

That suggests to me that the download is simply an image of the retail DVD disc.