Vudu Boxes Now Stream 1080p Movie Rentals

By Nick Mokey October 2, 2008

Owners of Vudu set-top boxes got a little more out of their systems on Thursday when the company opened up availability of movie rentals in full HD, allowing users to view on-demand movies and other content in 1080p resolution. Vudu calls its new format HDX, a form of compression that shrinks files enough to offer HD content without download times, but also without the artifacts and quality sacrifice typically associated with high compression.

The company employed a number of new technologies to make streaming 1080p video through home Internet connections possible. Pyschovisual processing, for instance, preserves detail in the darkest parts of an image where quality is typically lost, while variable bitrate technology allocates more data to scenes with the most motion and detail.

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Vudu’s initial offering of 65 HDX titles includes new movies like 21 and Speed Racer alongside classics like The Jerk and Saturday Night Fever. Although the movies range in rental price, the HDX versions carry no price premium from the versions offered in 720p high definition.

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4K vs. 1080p vs. 720p TV: What’s the difference?

Sony Z8H TV

Buying a new TV can be a fun-filled adventure -- but also an agonizing nightmare. In stores and online, you're bombarded with terms like HDR, OLED, QLED, 4K Ultra HD and Full HD. But what do they mean? Well, the latter two are resolutions, and they're used to indicate the number of pixels on a screen. As far as TV lingo goes, the more pixels there are, the better the picture quality. To understand why, though, we have to look at each resolution a bit more closely. Only then can you start considering what screen size is best and finally start taking a look at our list of the best 4K TVs to find the television of your dreams.
Pixels
Pixels are the building blocks for every display you've ever seen. They're tiny little dots that, together, make up the picture you see on a screen. You can only see these pixels if you're fairly close to the screen, of course. From a proper viewing distance, thousands of them blend to make the image on your screen.

Resolutions
720p
A 720p resolution television has 1,280 columns and 720 rows of pixels, hence "720p." Multiply the two numbers for a total of 921,600 pixels. This is the minimum TV resolution that can be called "high definition," or HDTV.
1080p
Often, 1080p is referred to as "Full HD." In a 1080p television, there are 1,920 columns multiplied by 1,080 rows for a total of 2,073,600 pixels -- more than twice as many pixels as you'll find in a 720p TV screen. For a while now, 1080p has been the industry standard for high-definition displays, and most content (that is, television broadcasts, shows, and movies) is produced and distributed in 1080p.
4K Ultra HD
The next level of HD is 4K -- often called "Ultra HD" or UHD. Technically, the name is a bit of a misnomer because there are 3,840 columns and 2,160 rows of pixels that make up a 4K TV screen, which is why you'll occasionally see this resolution referred to as 2160p. That's a total of 8,294,400 pixels, which is four times as many pixels as a Full HD 1080p display and nine times as many pixels as a 720p display. This is considered a high pixel density.

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The 7 best Chadwick Boseman movies you can stream right now

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Movie fans across the world are stunned by the sudden death of actor Chadwick Boseman. Earlier today, Boseman passed away from colon cancer, surrounded by his wife and family. In a statement, Boseman’s family revealed that he has been battling cancer for four years while maintaining a busy schedule that included blockbuster superhero movies and critically acclaimed films.

Boseman was only active as an actor for 17 years, but he amassed an impressive array of roles in that relatively short time. On the big screen, Boseman portrayed Black icons like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall, while also breathing life into fictional characters and action heroes.

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Fandango buys Vudu because movie theaters are dead (for now)

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What do you do when you're a business that derives most of its earning from movie ticket sales, now that the movie theater business has been mothballed for the foreseeable future? If you're Fandango, the answer is you buy Vudu, a movie streaming service with millions of potential viewers, from its current owner, Walmart.

The cost of the Vudu acquisition has not been released, but we do know a fair bit about Vudu itself. Unlike subscription streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or even Disney+, which offer an all-you-can-eat model for a monthly fee, Vudu is a movie rental business that has quietly grown over the years into an impressive streaming platform. It reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S and its mobile app has been downloaded over 14.5 million times, according to TechCrunch.