Voddler - A free movie library on the net

First I must admit that I had missed all the fuzz about Voddler, guess that is what happens when you spend 10 weeks at sea.

The story really started this spring when I signed up as beta tester for a service called Galaxter. At the time it was only providing previews of movies but I knew that the idea was to stream full length movies. Let me return to this soon...

A few weeks ago I started to get e-mails from a company called Voddler, if it wasn't for the fact that it was based in Sweden I would probably considered it to be spam. The first e-mail message was wishing me a "filmtastic summer" a bit currious I went to www.voddler.com only to be greated with the question if I was a Voddler. A What? I didn't quite feel like signing up for yet another service which I didn't know what it was and probably didn't need. That was the end of my Voddle experience I thought. I got a few more e-mails regarding updates and actually replied back and told them that I wasn't interested in any more updates.

Less than two days after I had been taken of from the e-mail list I wanted to see what had happened with Galaxter while I had been away. Judge of my surprise when I was redirected to the Voddler home page. Finally things started to make sense to me.

After a quick research I realized that Voddler was what Galaxter was supposed to become, the answer for legal movie downloads from the net. Before I give you my first impression and run through of the Voddler client let me tell you a little bit about Galaxter and what I think the Voddler webpage is going to be if they continue where Galaxter was six months ago. Galaxter was in many respect what the Voddler client is today but without full length movies. You could play trailers etc directly from the site in HD and just as with the Voddle client the delay was minimal.

Enought about the history, Voddler has been called to be the future for online movie distribution and yes the future is looking bright.



The first thing that you get when you start the client is the profile window, I suppose that the idea is that the whole family can have their own profile and their own favorite movies etc. This functionality is however not part of the beta yet.



Once logged in you have three options, Movies, TV-series and settings. So far there is no TV-series available. The settings page is just to adjust the video window and subtitles position, so lets focus on the movies, that's the reason you are still reading isn't it.



The default view is the wall, where movie covers are stacked together. Once the selection is moved over a movie some more informaion is displayed and when selected a new subpage with the different options is shown. Besides the wall there is also a list view with the benefit of showing the details and options directly as the selection moves. See below.







Once a movie is selected it can be played and depending on how much info that has been filled into the database their trailer and list of cast can also be shown.



Trailers start playing straight away while you have to watch a short commercial before watching the selected movie. I hope that they will keep the commercials to a minimum, while I been testing the client I have ony had to watch a single commercial before the selected movie started.





All interaction is done by 7 keys, left, right, up, down, space, enter and escape, all to make it easy to use the system with a normal remote. During playback you can pause the movie by pressing space or get the menu with alternatives by pressing enter.

There is also a settings page which can be accessed from the menu during playback to change the language subtitles and audio settings. See below.



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So after that rundown of the basic interface what is my impression?

First of all there is no hiding it, this is a beta, and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that the client will work for everyone. For example wouldn't the playback work with the graphics card in my PC but to my surprise everything worked relatively smoothly under Parallels on my Mac, a true Mac client has been announced once the beta phase is over.

But the most important thing is ofcause the movie quality and the availability. The movie quality is really good, I have attached screenshots so you all can judge for yourselves but I would guess that the video quality is as good as the source it been taken from.

How about the availability then? Unfortunately at the moment there is some occasional problems with getting the movies to start and on my PC I didn't manage to get any movie to play properly. On the Mac however the movies starts as expected most of the time. My main concern regarding the availability is however the fact that this is streamed video, it will require a reasonable bandwidth for the normal movies and around 10 MBit or more for HD content. So for movies on the run I suppose we have to look elsewhere still. But hopefully they will provide us with a solution that enables predownloaded movies to be watched.

I hope you enjoyed the introduction and let me finish by wishing that you also will get a filmtastic summer.