Not Great, But might be a stopgap until I go HD on Satellite or Cable
Written: Jan 02 '07
|
| Full Review |
I have been using DirecTV Standard Definition (SD) pay per view on a Tivo for the last few years, so this is what Movielink has to compete with for my PPV dollars.
Limited Time to View--The Show Stopper:
On Movielink, once you start watching the movie, you only have 24 hours to complete it. So if you start watching it at 8pm, get tired and want to come back the next night at 8pm and finish watching it, forget it--you can't. On Tivo I could record it and watch it as many times as I wanted forever. I think this single weakness will keep me from adopting it. You could "buy" the movie from them but it still needs the license downloaded to your PC to play and it seems that the purchase price of most of the movies was higher than the cost of the DVD. I don't quite understand why anyone would do this--I'd just order the DVD from Amazon.
Surround Sound--The Not So Great:
The Movielink web site doesn't discuss surround sound. From what I could tell, the movie I watched had some sort of surround, but didn't have Dolby or DTS surround (even though the DVD of this movie has it). Apparently, DirecTV has dropped surround sound on all of it's SD pay per view, so Movielink has half a leg up here.
Picture Quality--The OK:
The picture quality of the downloaded movie was better than SD DirecTV on my 46" Sony Bravia, and it was wide screen format. Better than DirecTV, since they have eliminated wide screen format SD PPV, so Movielink wins this category.
Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) Integration:
I've been giving my Windows MCE 2004 PC a workout over the last few days now that I have a 46" Sony Bravia attached. This is one of the few addon programs to MCE that has actually worked correctly. Most of them are VERY VERY buggy. This one seemed to work just fine. It does have one annoying feature that seems common to most of these MCE addins--no way to exit the program other than to hit the Media Center Button on the remote.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
forthe5
|
|
Member: Sam
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Atlanta Real Estate Agent. Former IT Consultant with Ga Tech BS Computer Science
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.