Originally Posted By: Phoenix42
The Roku does play local content - though only on their $100 box, and only via an attached USB drive.

I was aware of that, but I don't count Roku's local media playback because it's awful. I don't want to sneakernet my files to the box, and I don't want to pay $15 more to play that stuff. Compared to Boxee, nothing else matches its ability to play local content.

Originally Posted By: Phoenix42
...only via an attached USB drive. I'd prefer it to have the option of doing this from a network share...

I'd love to hear why. It seems like a terrible inconvenience to me. I love throwing stuff on my NAS and having it automatically show up on my Boxee, all nicely sorted with artwork and episode info.

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
The Apple TV is a POS too. smile I'd still tell someone who wants a low-cost media player to stick with WDTV of some sort.
Originally Posted By: Phoenix42
From a UI point of view I gather the Roku has the WDTV and the like beat. I've not used a WDTV, but I've seen complaints about it's sluggishness.

I can't imagine recommending the WDTV to anybody I know. The UI is terrible. And Bruno, all the people who have asked me about boxes like this have no local content to view anyway. They want to know how to get Netflix onto their TV. If that's what an average consumer wants, there's no cheaper and better way to do it than with a Roku. I just don't understand why you think it's a POS. Just because you don't like it?

Quote:
How does Amazon's Video on Demand compare with Vudu for content and pricing? I think this is a fair comparison than comparing Vudu, per movie, with Netflix, all you can eat streaming (assuming you can find something you like...), due to the different pricing models.

Nobody would compare vudu and Netflix on a per-movie basis for one reason: Netflix only dreams of having the same movies vudu [or Amazon] does. vudu and Amazon have the big/recent movies, and Netflix unfortunately can't match that.

As far as pricing between vudu and Amazon goes, it's actually pretty easy to compare the prices. Promotions aside, Amazon typically charges $3.99 for recent movies (see this page for a random sample of fairly recent big releases). Those are all prices for SD streaming of movies to your desktop computer.

If you go through an Amazon VOD device you have the option to rent HD movies. In general, those prices will be $1 more than their SD counterpart (so we're at $4.99). Those are the two options you get with Amazon.

Now, on vudu the prices are essentially the same. They start at $3.99 for SD, go to $4.99 for HD 720p, but then they top out at $5.99 for 1080p.

The challenge in comparing the prices then comes down to comparing the quality of the streams. It looks like Amazon's bitrate tops out somewhere in vudu's mid-range, so the the comparison seems to work out pretty well. As far as I've seen, there's no other streaming service out there that matches vudu's highest quality video (which really is gorgeous, streaming or not).
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Matt