Humax DRT800 & Amazon Unbox Impressions

[jhm783]

I just signed up for Amazon Unbox video downloads. I ordered a movie (Idiocracy). It began downloading within 5 minutes and took about 45 minutes to complete. Later, I watched it and was astounded, not by the movie, but the video quality. It looked as good as playing a regular DVD. I have the Tivo hooked up to a HDTV using the component video cables. Normally, regular TV shows from the Humax have horrible resolution, fuzzy and blurry, even at the best quality.
I now conclude that this poor video quality is because of the compression method used by Humax. DVD's and now downloaded movies have really great quality.
Any thoughts?

[MMG]

I noticed the exact same thing with my Pioneer DVR - 57H. Stellar quality.

[Chester_Lampwick]

Well, this shouldn't really be surprising. The TiVo encodes a live video signal. It can't do a double pass like the movie studios do. The tradeoff is you can have really good video with a single pass if you have a very large filesize, or a reasonable sized file with a noticeable degradation of quality.

This affects the DVD units more than the regular TiVo that can have tweaked settings, but the DRT800 has to make a DVD spec'd file. The transferred file from UnBox doesn't have to conform, so it may even be better than a storebought DVD.....

[jhm783]

Unfortunately, the recordings on the SA Explorer 8300HD box I got from Cablevision seem perfectly fine and on par with the live TV resolution.

Resolution aside, what do you think of the Unbox service. I was disappointed with the DRM that deleted the rented movie 24 hours after I watched it (although you have possibly a month to watch it the first time). I suppose if you bought the movie you still wouldn't be able to off-load it from the Tivo, although you could download it again and again.

[ttwiv]

I ordered my first movie on March 17, and didn't get around to watching it until now (4/8), but I couldn't as I got an error (from my Humax Tivo) when I tried to play it saying that the video signal was not present when the movie was recording. Must have been a glitch in the downloaded file. Can't download again because I had already downloaded twice from Unbox to the same TiVo box (because the first download request hadn't started a couple hours after I initiated it, so I initiated another request). Just sent Amazon a customer service request to have them reset the download count so I can try again.

[jhm783]

ttwiv: Please let us know what happened!

[ttwiv]

RE: "please let us know..."

Amazon customer service gave me a $3.99 credit to use in order to re-download it. The credit was accompanied by a boiler-plate message about being sorry that I wasn't able to watch the show before the 30-day period was up, and they gave me the credit. I had explained in my message that only two weeks had passed, and the show was there, it just wouldn't play. I didn't bother replying telling them they didn't read my original message. I just accepted the credit. I haven't tried downloading another one yet...