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I was interested in trying a Mega-site of this type and debated between VideoBox and VideosZ. VideosZ makes it easy to browse what they have. VideoBox makes it hard. I suspect because their UI for browsing is not as slick looking as their home page.
Still as a potential customer it's important to know what they have. For those interested go to http://www.videobox.com/studios and you can see what they have available similar to at VideosZ.
It's fairly easy to browse by studio or model and even perform filtering beyond that. It's not a great UI design but I found it more functional than many sites. Ultimately you are displayed a thumbnail for each scene with click-able Title, Tags, & Names. Scrubbing over the thumbnail lets you view the video as a series of images and clicking on the image takes you to the player page where the video begins playing at that point in the video. Nice!
You can create a custom clip of the video selecting only the portion you want and just download that piece instead of the whole video. Very Nice!
They have the most accommodating download system I've yet used. You stay logged in for 24hrs and their links do not expire. You can load over a hundred downloads into a manager and just let it go. No limits, expirations, nothing. Just DL all you want. And they add 4 DVDs worth of content daily. Mega Awesome!
But let's talk about exactly what you'll be downloading.
Download options are presented best to worse as H.264-DVD, WMV-DVD, WMV-High, IPhone. And...they all look bad.
The "DVD" options may use a DVD as a source but they are certainly below DVD quality. The quality is comparable to a mediocre tube site. In fact VideoBox IS essentially a tube site with a large collection & a mostly accurate database to help you find stuff.
Occasionally their videos offer a 720HD option. I'd say < 5% of them. Quality varies a lot with these. They can look like a soft poor quality DVD, an actual DVD, or like a decent 720HD video that is a bit better than DVD.
It's not uncommon to find inaccurate information on their videos. Most egregious is when the wrong performer names are listed. I also ran into rare instances when a video file was corrupt, audio was just static, or audio was played at reduced speed making it sound like a demonic orgy. This is rare, but not so rare that I didn't run into it.
It's very convenient to be able to go to a single place for everything but it is disheartening when you find a scene you want and you know it should look a LOT better than it does.
I'll liken VideoBox to NetFlix in the following analogy: It's a convenient one-stop shop that allows you to browse thru a large & diverse library to find what you want and try stuff out. And you can certainly watch the video. But if you find something you really like, perhaps "The Hobbit". Are you going to be happy with a low quality version of it, or do you want the 3D Extended Edition Blu-ray.
I fall into the 3D Extended Edition Blu-ray category so while I appreciate a lot of what VideoBox does it is not really for me.
If you're not concerned with video quality and just want inexpensive browsing of material you can add ~10 points to this review score.
Currently the cost thru TBP/PU is a very reasonable $12/month. If you're not concerned about the video quality or you want to find an old video that you don't expect high quality from - absolutely join up. Otherwise though, I think you'll find the site intriguing but ultimately disappointing. |
