VideoBox (0)
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| Status: |
Was a member approx. 2 months prior to this review.
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| Pros: |
75,000+ scenes (even including repeats and extras) with 20-30 added every day
Good streaming player
Lot's of scenes that aren't available anywhere except VOD sites
Ability to cut scenes to only watch certain portions |
| Cons: |
Navigation is okay, but could be better
Download options (could use 1080p HD option)
Most new uploads are standard definition
Didn't max out my download speed most days
Some premium channels don't do HD uploads for recent movies |
| Bottom Line: |
When talking about Videobox, in the end it comes down to the basic question of quality vs. quantity. Which isn't to say that there isn't good content here. There is, and in a general sense, there's a lot of it. It's just that there's so much content, that a lot of the good stuff can just get lost, so you have to go hunting for it. And if you're solely focusing on the newly uploaded movies (which is a bad idea, IMO), then the ratio of good to bad looks even worse. When you're running a site with this much content, the thing you absolutely have to focus on is search and discovery. Making it as easy as you can find to find the type of content you're looking for makes the site look a lot better, because there's probably going to be something you really like here no matter what you're tastes are. And while Videobox does look like it's trying improve there, it looks like there's still a ways to go.
As stated, the big draw of Videobox is the amount of scenes. They list over 85,000 scenes, which is more than any other company that I can think of. Even if you get rid of all the repeated uploads (of which there are a lot), you've still probably got more than 75,000 scenes. Forget about a month, that's more content than most people could hope to go through in half a year. The content goes back at least a good 20 years, and you can find scenes that are a good deal older than that. And many of these scenes/movies are from companies that not only don't produce content anymore, but closed up shop before the internet became the primary method of porn distribution. In other words, these are scenes from companies that don't have websites, so outside of VOD this is the only place you can find them. Having that many scenes allows you to have so much variety in them that there is almost literally something for everyone.
When it comes to watching those scenes, everything is pretty much standard (good streaming, good downloading), with 2 caveats. The first is that the quality maxes out at 720p. Which is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. The second is a feature they have that makes it so that you don't have to download the whole scene if you don't want to. Basically, when you go to the scene page, you can pick a start point and an end point, and then just download the video between those two points. It works really well, and I can see it being great for people who just want specific acts inside a certain scene.
And now we get to finding those scenes. They do offer the basics that most large sites have in terms of finding scenes. All scenes are tagged with female talent and tags specific to the acts in the scene, so you can look for them that way. You can also combine these tags to search for multiple things at once. There is a small issue where searching for a tag (act or actor) with the search box doesn't always show all the scenes that have that tag on them. There are also a small amount of scenes that are tagged with the male talent in them as well, which is both nice and disappointing. It's nice that they have the ability to do it, but it's disappointing that it doesn't look like they have any interest in doing it. I've always found it's one of the easiest ways to decide which scene of a particular performer I'd like to watch, and think every site that is large enough to have recognizable male talent in their scenes should say who they are in some way. You can favorite movies, scenes, and actors, but not studios or directors, as far as I can tell. And as has been mentioned by someone else recently, it would actually be a great thing if it could notify you that someone in your favorites list has a new scene uploaded. It would prevent a lot of having to dig around to find their scenes.
There were also a few smaller annoyances that I encountered in my time here. The first was that I could never get a single file to max out my download speed. I can max out at about 2.5-3MB/s on pretty much every other site I visit, but here I never got above 2, which was strange. Another thing was the lack of HD in most of the recent uploads. Generally, when they upload 5 movies per day, and only one of them is HD. This is acceptable when it's obvious that the movie was shot before the spread of HD cameras. But what I don't like is when I know that movies were shot in HD, but there is no HD version uploaded. This was especially noticeable on the Vivid premium channel, which was doubly annoying seeing as I paid extra for it. And even with that, Vivid was still worth it, since as far as I know Vivid's site doesn't allow downloads, while their Videobox channel does.
Just on the basis of the amount of content they have, I think every porn movie fan should join Videobox at least once, as there's bound to be enough content to keep you happy for at least a month. Whether you should join for longer depends on your tastes, and how much effort you're willing to put into finding content that you will like. |
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