Lets face it. I’m a film geek. I love relaxing while taking in a good movie, and I get really excited about hearing of new movies long before the premiere date even has been announced. (Max Manus would be a prime example of this)
Like many others I’ve been enjoying the beta version of Voddler lately. I’ve previously written a short blurb about Spotify, so It only seems natural to type a little something something up about this as well.
Voddler can pretty much be summed up as Spotify for movies, but to quote voddler themselves:
With Voddler you can watch movies and TV shows the way you want, anytime. Voddler is easy, legal and available around the clock – with great image and sound quality.
After using it for a little while Im not so sure about the quality bit, but it is legal, easy and available around the clock. Right now the selection of movies feels kind of small, but I would expect this to change when they move out of beta.
The very first thing which struck me when first booting up the application was that it was kind of odd that you couldn’t use your mouse to navigate the GUI. But, when you read why Voddler decided to make it this way, it makes a little more sense. Voddler is designed not only to run on your regular computer, but also on your living room media center setup, provided that you have one… which I for one do not have.
So, apparently, the reason for rendering the mouse unusable was to enable the application to be navigated via a regular infrared remote, which I guess would correspond to the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Clever, but I still don’t get why we just couldn’t have our cake and eat it too, just this once.
And then there’s the issue with a constant flow of communication with Voddler’s servers, even when you’re not using the application. Always sitting there, eating bandwidth, unless you deactivate the voddler service of course. I suspect quite a few will find this to be a huge turnoff. Especially if you’re on a bandwidth quota or have one of those mobile broadband deals.
But it’s not all complaints! Let’s take a closer look at the user interface and features after the jump!
The very first thing you see when you first boot up the application is the option to make a new user. Voddler is thankfully keeping it simple here, and the process of setting up a user takes less than a minute, provided you have a keyboard, of course.
Following this, you’re greeted by a clean and minimalistic main menu which gives you three options; Settings, movies and quit.
The settings option takes you to a pretty easy to understand wizard which lets you adjust the image to fit your screen, and the positioning of the subtitles. Strangely enough there is no option to disable subtitles, so your best bet right now to get rid of them, is to position them somewhere off-screen.
The movies option takes you to the movie listing, obviously. This list comes in two flavors, (Wall and list-view) available to you from the “view” option at the far end of the list page’s main menu.
The list view is a little more packed with info without having to push any extra buttons, and brings up a small synopsis of the movie, in addition to some general info such as release year and runtime, both of which are available in wall view as well, however, note the user review feature. This is one of my favorite features when it comes to this application. After you’ve watched a movie, Voddler asks you to rate the movie, and these ratings are what is being shown in the screenshot above and below. These ratings also seem to be what’s controlling the “recommended” page you’re first greeted by when choosing the movies option from the main menu, so in a sense the very first thing you see is a community driven top-list, which is a really nice feature.
After you’ve chosen your movie, it’s time for some commercials. These sessions seems to vary in duration, but the averedge seems to be somewhere between 5 to 8 minutes. Not too bad, seeing as how you get to watch a free movie afterwards, however there doesn’t seem to be much variation in the commercials, so watching the same commercials and movie trailer for the 10th time is kind of a pain. (Yes, they make you watch some ads and a trailer-show)
And speaking of commercials, let me just take a brief moment to ask the Swedish people the following question regarding this particular Expert commercial:
What in god’s name is this thing!?
Anyway, back on topic. You might be wondering how movies look on a free video on demand service, and the answer is not as bad as I expected, but far from jaw dropping.
Here are two stills from the movie selected above, fade to black, from 2006:
Voddler certainly is a huge step in the right direction in terms of alternatives to piracy, there’s no doubt about that, and its definitively worth checking out if you don’t mind having the Voddler network manager running in the background.
However, I’m still abut torn between the negative and positive sides of the application. You get to watch free movies around the clock, which is great, however, you also get a 24/7 resource hog unless you disable it, and let me tell you right now, if you do disable it, expect a reboot of your computer to get it up and running again. (And what a resource hog it is! Last night I caught it using over 300 000 kB of memory, just idling!) It might be just me, but I have not a single time experienced Voddler working again after re-starting the Voddler network client. Hopefully this will change in the future.
So yes, I’m still not sure if I like Voddler yet. If you feel like making up your own mind, head over to voddler.com and sign up for a beta invitation. They seem to be giving them out quite frequently these days so now is as good of a time as any to sign up!
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