For Movie Purists, Sharp Images From the Vudu Box

So Mrs. Hollywood comes home one day to find her husband bound and gagged, with a hole shot through his foot. “Honey!” she screams, racing to help him. “Who did this to you?”

Mr. Hollywood looks up and says, “I did.”

Granted, that joke isn’t ha-ha funny. All right, it’s not funny at all. But what a great metaphor for the downloadable movie business, eh?

These days, anyone born after 1980 expects instant delivery of entertainment. But the Internet movie scene is still dismal: the movies are overpriced, heavily copy protected and lacking subtitles, commentaries or extras. The selection is thin. And even if you go to the trouble of downloading, each movie deletes itself 24 hours after you start playback.

This is not how you win over movie lovers’ hearts, especially when free, unencumbered alternatives like BitTorrent are one click away.

Into this landscape comes the Vudu movie box ($300), which, even a year after its debut, hardly anyone has ever heard of. It’s a small, black set-top box that offers instant playback of 10,000 movies and TV shows. (The first 30 seconds of each are on the hard drive; as you start watching, the rest downloads in the background.) The four-button remote control has an ingenious clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse.

So why hasn’t the Vudu become more of a hit? You know, apart from the fact that there’s been no advertising?

After all, it trumps services like CinemaNow and MovieLink, because the movies play on your TV, not your computer. It beats HBO and Showtime, because you pay by the movie, not by the month, and recent movies become available much sooner. (Vudu movies become available for sale on the Vudu the same day they’re out on DVD. They generally become available for 24-hour rental 30 days later. Except for Warner movies, which are rentable on Day 1. Go Warner!)

And it’s better than driving back and forth to the video store, because — well, because you don’t have to drive back and forth to the video store.

Of course, plenty of people would argue that DVD-by-mail services like Netflix and Blockbuster Online are still the way to go. They offer just about every movie ever made, impose no viewing deadlines, and charge a flat fee for nearly unlimited movies on DVD. The catch: They’re still not instant.

You have to wait for each DVD to come in the mail. And any Netflix subscriber can tell you what a bummer it is to crash onto the couch after a hard day, only to realize that all you’ve got on hand from Netflix are two depressing war documentaries.

In any case, Vudu has quietly been making the deal even better. The price has been reduced by $100, and many movies are now available in high definition.

The company has also added a channel for sex movies — a cynical ploy for success if there ever was one — and an accompanying parental-controls screen.

Another recent enhancement: you can extend a Vudu rental for a second day for $1.

The 24-hour window is absurd from the get-go — why should downloadable movies offer any less viewing time than a DVD rented from Blockbuster? It should be a three-day or seven-day window, period. But at least you no longer have to rent the movie a second time, at full price, to watch just the last 15 minutes.

The most interesting development, however, arrived only today: a free software upgrade that permits the Vudu box to play movies in a new movie-quality level, called HDX. It’s a reaction to all the Web sites, cable companies and satellite services whose “hi-def” movies don’t look nearly as good as they should because they are so heavily compressed.

The HDX versions of Vudu movies are insanely sharp; they make standard films look blurry and washed out by comparison. It’s like seeing a movie on VHS videotape and DVD side by side.

In the HDX “Rambo,” for example, the banding was gone from the hazy, humid Thailand skies, and you can see nuanced detail in the nighttime river shots that are simply black in standard definition.

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To see why HDX looks so good — especially on big screens — check its data rate, a measure of how much information is used to describe each frame of the video. It averages around 9 megabits a second, but spikes to 20 during action scenes. Compare that with Vudu standard definition: (2.2 megabits a second), Vudu and Apple TV high definition (4), regular DVD (8) or Blu-ray DVD (40). In other words, HDX quality is somewhere between DVD and Blu-ray. The audio offers a 40 percent improvement, too.

Now, the truth is, the most gigantic quality leap on the Vudu was from standard definition to high definition. The additional quality leap to HDX is not nearly as remarkable.

CONTINUED : A juicy brand of instant movie gratification

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