Amazon Unbox: A Linux user’s perspective
Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 2:08 amAmazon Unbox is this new on-demand video service from Amazon that they released back in September of 2006. Amazon created this service as competition with Apple’s iTunes, allowing you to view movies and TV shows right on your Windows PC. Also, now with the new TiVo integration, Unbox+TiVo directly competes with iTV (Apple’s new set-top Mac that exists to play iTunes content on your TV).
As an aside, my test system is a pretty outdated Sempron 2600+, 2GB of memory, and a NVidia 6800XT with 256MB; it can play Quake 3 extremely well, but anything beyond that, eh, not so well. This is really the low end of usability on high performance applications today; by far, it is below average without question. The test video is Final Flight of the Osiris, the 9 minute video from The Animatrx produced by the Square film production unit that produced Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. As I have the DVD for The Animatrix I can see what the difference is side by side.
Unbox does not work with Linux. At all. Not in Wine (installer freaks out), and don’t even bother trying in VMWare due to lack of video card acceleration (this may change in the future, however, as VMWare wants to pass acceleration through to X at some point). This alone makes me want to severely dislike the product; not only this, if I owned a Mac, it doesn’t work on Macs either. If I was scoring this on a 10 point scale, Amazon has already lost 5 points.
So, to perform any video quality testing, I had to reboot to XP, something I very rarely do as Wine and Windows in VMWare does everything I need to do. Just to make what I said clear, I will never ever use Unbox again outside of this try-out as I refuse to reboot to just watch a movie; but for just this once, I’ll allow it.
The application itself uses a standard MSI installer, and is easy to use and figure out. I had no problems installing it, and playback performed fine on my test system with no hiccups. On my 3mbps DSL, within 3 minutes the player was ready to play Osiris, and by 9 minutes (or about 6 minutes into the film) the video was finished downloading.
Osiris used about 220 megs, and was encoded with the VC-1 codec (as are all Unbox videos). Compared to mplayer playing straight from the DVD using -vf pp=ac for post-processing, the DVD is noticeably sharper and more detailed. Comparatively, you may not be able to notice this on a 480i/p TV, but you will notice this on a display that is at least 853×480 (a 720×480 16:9 DVD stretched to 1:1 pixel ratio), which includes virtually every computer monitor in use, and also 720p and 1080p TVs.
So, between the fact it won’t run on Linux, or Macs, or Video iPods, and only on Windows or handhelds that support Microsoft’s PlayForSure (which even Zunes don’t support), I cannot see an actual point to Unbox at this time. The TiVo integration is nifty, but just like Apple’s iTV and on-demand services provided by cable, satellite, and telephone companies, it is a very niche market.
At this time, I cannot recommend Unbox for use by any user, let alone Linux ones. I give Unbox a 0 out 10 ten for Linux and Mac users and 0 out of 10 for Windows users. Spend your money elsewhere, such as on the original discs, they’re well worth the money.
I do like the unbox service in because I was able to watch Battlestar Galactica when I had time to do so. However I also use linux for most everything and do not like rebooting to windows to watch my movies. I also have a zune and was very disappointed that I couldn’t put the portable versions on it. All the videos have drm protection so you can’t even burn them to DVD without going through a very long conversion process with 3rd party software. You CAN stream the videos to an XBox in windows but even that was glitchy, with my videos stopping in random spots and the XBox reporting that it “might” not support the video format. Right…that makes sense.
Besides the lack of Linux & Mac support (a big killer), the Amazon app requires the user to be a local system admin. For a lot of business users (read: people who travel a lot and would like to catch a movie during the downtime), this prevents them from using the service on an otherwise capable system. Hrumph…
It’s an called an Apple TV not iTV.
Don’t worry from what I heard it doesn’t work on windows either.
I agree with Yin and Oliver. On Oliver’s comment, I too first check for a “legal” Linux compatible download. If one can’t be found I fire up Bit Torrent and download what I want…usually at a lower quality than what I’d like, but at least I get what I’m looking for. I don’t mind paying for what I want…the problem is it’s usually not available.
At least Amazon’s digital music is easy to get and play on Linux!
I couldn’t agree more with Yin’s comments. Looking at the timestamps I see that the best part of a year has past between our posts and very little has changed, and not just in the American music/movie industry. When will content distributors realize that the online distribution should not be viewed as theft but competition? If I could get content from a secure and trusted source with the same easy that I can find and download illegally, I would choose to pay for it every time.
The technology exists and is only getting better, someone needs to come up with a good business model to exploit it.
The American music/movie industry is pissing me off. I already spend huge chunks of money on content and my issue is not that, but getting it. The movie rental shop doesn’t stock enough films and renting DVDs online is a pain. I see no reason I should not be paying more than 75 cents to watch an episode of any show given I can rent a DVD for $4 with 5 or so episodes usually. Considering they already broadcast these shows over the air with advertisements I see no reason I should pay anything at all for them on the net. I don’t mind the advertisements, and so long as they are charging for DRM content I won’t be a party to it= and WILL steal. The world isn’t fair- and the movie industry can loose money (even though they aren’t) for all I care if they won’t do what WE as consumers demand of them.