Rating: 5 WaterTowers (still nearly perfect)
After you are done here: See my original review of VUDU.
This weekend we recieved our new Vudu system. As you may already know, we love Vudu and we used it for a long time before I actually had to remind Vudu that we had the demo unit.
Life was miserable without Vudu. Now we have our own, and in the two months or so we have been without it, there have been some cool additions to the service. Not surprising since they update a lot.
Cool New Features
The first new feature I noticed was the addition of a rating by the “community” in addition to the rating by the “critics”. In my opinion, the “community” rating means more to me.
The next feature I noticed was “Vudu Labs”. This is an area where Vudu is testing new applications. I really love this! Figure 1 shows a screen shot.
Within Vudu Labs, we can:
- View YouTube videos (including our own)
- View publically available Flickr pictures (again, including our own)
- Watch special streamed video from categories such as New, Sports, Entertainment and more. For example, I watched a CNN update for Sunday. Very cool. 🙂
- There are games. The old Asteroid game from, I believe, the Atari (how many of you remember that?) days has been upgraded….and I still lose. There are also several versions of solitaire.
Adult content has also been added. I suppose to be totally objective, I will have to review this portion as well. 😉 Stay tuned. What I have seen so far is that Vudu “After Dark” takes you into a different set of tabs. I believe (I will check and update) that that can be password protected to keep the young’uns away.
Installation
Installation proceeded normally until I got to the page that said it was “Updating Content” (see figure 2). I got to that stage pretty late at night and decided to let it run over night.
Unfortunately, when I woke up it was still on that page. I pondered what to do and finaly rebooted Vudu.
After the reboot, it found my account, did a bandwidth test, and took only about 10 or 15 minutes to move past the offending page.
TelBitConsulting says: Not sure if this happens a lot, but, it would have been nice to have the option of getting out of that mode without rebooting.
Updated Diagram
Figure 3 shows the latest schematic. The video and audio from every component is terrific.
We now have a full complement of clickers lining up under the TV (Figure 4), and the new Black Box 3 to 1 HMDI interface box is now full.
I connected the Vudu to port 3 of the Black Box, and to the Cable / Sat audio input on the Bose since my TV inputs have run out.
Summary
We now have our own Vudu. How cool is that!
Let’s hope that Vudu can stay in business in this awful economy (I have seen some web pages referring to this). From my point of view, escaping reality by watching movies, is something we all need. Our own stimulus package.
Vudu ROCKS!!!
TechyMike: Technology Made Easy 