So we were pretty bummed in our
early testing of
Amazon's newly HD-enabled Video On Demand service to find that it only streamed stereo audio instead of full 5.1 surround, but it looks like that's actually device-dependent -- we just tried it out on our TiVo HD, and movies play back in Dolby Digital 5.1. Yeah, that's still no Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD, but it's definitely a vast upgrade from the sad two channels we got off the Roku Video Player. So why the difference? The TiVo doesn't stream content like the Roku -- it actually downloads a video file and plays it locally from its hard drive. That means that in addition to surround audio, we also saw a pretty dramatic increase in picture quality over the Roku -- not exactly Blu-ray, but at least on par with the Apple TV, which also downloads content locally. Sure, downloading first means playback can be much slower to start, but we'll take the delay over a blocky image any day. Our only gripe is that the TiVo interface is far less attractive and workable than the Roku's -- although it has a search feature, everything seems a little clunky and thrown together, and the UI just feels plain slower. Overall, though, it's hard to see TiVo owners complaining about this upgrade -- check out a hands-on video after the break.
posted Apr 22nd 2009 4:11PM
Bitrate? Resolution? I may have missed the details...
1280x720, 6Mbps, Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile.
Audio is WMA9 Pro w/ 5.1 channels, 48/24, 384kbps.
Not doubting you, but where did you get that info about the encoding? If Audio is WMA9 Pro, how is the person in the article getting Dolby Digital on their receiver? Does the Tivo box transcode the audio?
They are the same files you can download using Amazon Unbox on a PC. Simply download one to your PC and play it in Windows Media Player, and you can see the codecs being used.
Well that's scrumptious
But really, after watching blu ray these streaming/download solutions are sooooo sub par! If i'm gonna invest a few hours of my life in a movie, it's gonna be BLU RAY or BUST
Is this supposed to be live now, or just a preview to the media?
These are not bad but compared to blu-ray... meh..
Does Tivo Beta Search work for searching the HD on Demand titles?