Broadband Internet users all have one thing in common: they want fast downloads. In this regard, movie watchers will be pleased with Vudu. Using streaming technology, the Vudu TV set-top box offers an online movie rental and purchase system, allowing you to choose a movie from a vast collection and watch it immediately with the click of a button. Though speedy delivery is Vudu’s strength, the device doesn’t fall short in quality. Movies streamed from Vudu look comparable to those on DVDs, and the sound is excellent. I personally was a little disappointed in the breadth of new releases that are offered by Vudu, and the fee structure—which Vudu says is imposed by the movie studios—is somewhat complicated and frustrating. But since Vudu is in its very early stages, I’m optimistic it can expand and improve.

Use external storage devices with Mac. External hard drives, thumb drives, USB drives, Flash memory cards, and devices like iPod are examples of storage devices that you can connect to your Mac using Thunderbolt, USB, or FireWire cables, or connect wirelessly using Bluetooth. How do I download Vudu movies to an external hard drive? I've got the Vudu-To-Go desktop app. My computer isn't 4K compatible, so the movies I own in 4K only offered me a download.

Setup and hardware

A compact, black box weighing 4.2 pounds, Vudu connects directly to a broadband connection and a television or display. The setup is as simple as plugging in the audio, video, power, and Ethernet cables and powering on the device. You’ll see Vudu’s startup screen on your television, and after setting up your Vudu account at the company’s Web site, you’ll be able to rent or purchase a movie and watch it.

The Vudu box contains a 250GB hard disk drive—enough to store approximately 100 hours of movies. Vudu’s movies are encoded in the MPEG4 format, and the hardware supports HDMI v1.1, component, S-Video, and composite connections. For audio, Vudu supports HDMI v1.1, digital optical, digital coax, and RCA. Although Vudu supports HD output, the service currently doesn’t offer any HD movies. However, Vudu representatives say that HD movies will be available once deals are finalized with studios.

You can also set up Vudu to work with your wireless network by connecting the device to a wireless bridge. Vudu’s specifications recommend at least an 802.11g or faster router to ensure speedy delivery. Sonic r game free download pc full version. But since you probably won’t be moving your Vudu very often, I’d suggest connecting directly to the network via wired Ethernet.

Usability and interface

The Vudu service is innovative, and so is Vudu’s remote control. Small, black, smooth, and shaped like an overgrown peanut, the remote rests very comfortably in the palm of your hand. The most innovative feature on the remote is its vertical scroll wheel for navigation and selection, which eliminates the need for excessive button mashing to get to the movie you want to watch. There are four other buttons: a Back button, a Play/Pause button, a Vudu Main Menu button, and a More button. Overall, I found the remote very intuitive and fun to use.

Vudu’s main menu is a black screen containing five options: Find Movies, New Releases, My Movies, My Wish List, and Info & Settings. Below those options are side-by-side poster images of currently featured movies, which you can quickly choose to watch. After selecting the Find Movies option, Vudu’s menu gives you several options for choosing a movie: Explore Genres, Search By Title, Search By Actor or Director, Vudu’s Top Rated, and Staff Picks. Selecting a movie brings up a window containing details, such as the movie’s cast, director, synopsis, star-rating, studio, and run time. From here, you can also click on the director or actor names and browse through other movies by that director or featuring those stars.

How it works

Vudu doesn’t achieve the impossible by downloading an entire video the instant you click the rent or buy button. Vudu streams video, which means that you watch the video as it downloads; you can only fast-forward through the entire video once it finishes downloading.

Something less obvious to Vudu users is that they’re not only downloading—they’re uploading, too. With the box connected to the Internet, each Vudu user essentially contributes to a peer-to-peer network to ensure the delivery of every movie. The upload rate is capped at a reasonable rate (300 Kbps), so Vudu won’t make your Internet connection sluggish.

Speed and quality

In my First Look at Vudu, I performed testing over a high-throughput connection in our office. But to test Vudu in a more realistic setting, I took the device home and plugged it into my 3 Mbps cable modem connection, which is the minimum speed that Vudu recommends in its specifications. Even though I met only the minimum requirements, I was able to select a movie and watch it the whole way through without any interruption. Those of you with broadband connections below 3 Mbps, don’t say you weren’t warned: I also tested Vudu on a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection, and I had to wait 20 minutes before I could watch an entire movie uninterrupted.

I watched movies from Vudu on a Toshiba 26HF85 HD-ready CRT television. The movies I watched matched DVD quality, with accurate colors, and sound was crisp and clear. I noticed some pixelation due to compression among brighter colors when watching digitally animated movies such as Monster House . But this pixelation was negligible, and overall I had a very pleasant viewing experience with Vudu.

Fees and selection

The Vudu box costs $399, and there are no subscription or activation fees. One-time rentals range from $1 for older films to $4 for new releases. Renting a movie immediately activates a 24-hour clock: during that time you can watch the movie as many times as you wish. The price for owning movies ranges from $5 to $20, depending on the film’s studio, age, and popularity, among other factors. When you choose to purchase a movie, Vudu streams and stores the movie on its 250GB hard drive. Interestingly, Vudu currently doesn’t offer an option to delete any movies you purchase. According to Vudu, a delete option will be added eventually. The company also says that the device will include support for external hard disk drives to store movies at some point in the future.

Vudu’s rental and owning fees can seem somewhat complicated since the company is licensing in coordination with movie studios. An annoying side effect to this is that when Vudu first adds a title to its collection, for an unspecified number of days that title is only available for purchase. After that, the movie will be available for rental. I think this marketing strategy is a hindrance to the idea inherent in the digital movie era—sparing you a trip to the video store. If I felt like watching a recently added movie on Vudu but I were only given the option to own it, I would rather drive to the video store and rent the movie at a lower cost. I realize that Vudu isn’t necessarily at fault for this, since the studios determine these time windows. I’m hoping that after some experimentation, the studios will work out a deal with Vudu to abolish these time windows.

Vudu has partnerships with every major studio and 18 independents, offering 5,000 movies as of this writing—greatly exceeding the iTunes Store’s current offering of only about 500 movies. Though Vudu’s library is impressive, I was a bit disappointed with the service’s New Releases selection. When I tested Vudu, titles such as 300 and Disturbia were available for viewing in this section; these were released on DVD about two months ago. I personally would prefer it if Vudu focused on keeping its New Releases up-to-date while slowly adding older titles to the library. However, Vudu is still in its early stages, and the service will be adding more movies to its collection on a weekly basis. I’m confident that, with time, Vudu’s library will expand to keep up with the constant flow of new releases.

Macworld’s buying advice

Download Vudu Movies To External Hard Drive

Vudu is an impressive device that brings instant movie entertainment to your living room. Fun, easy to use, and offering great video and sound quality, Vudu has the potential to become a revolutionary device in the digital-movie era. But before purchasing Vudu, you may want to wait until studios work out a more reasonable, less complicated fee structure. Waiting for Vudu to mature may also be beneficial to allow the service to get its New Releases up-to-date—and add high-definition offerings to the library.

[ Brian Chen is an assistant editor at Macworld.]

'Can I transfer my Vudu movies to iTunes? – I have purchased quite a few movies from Vudu and would like to get movies from Vudu to iTunes and then watch Vudu movies on my iOS devices, but there seem to be no solution to put Vudu movies to iTunes. Can you transfer Vudu movies to iTunes? Can you tell me how to move movies from Vudu to iTunes? Quite great appreciation to any help.'

There are quite a lot of people who would like to get Vudu movies to iTunes library so that they could freely watch Vudu movies on different iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod), iTunes and Apple TV. If you are looking for solutions on how to get movies from Vudu to iTunes library, this guide would be exactly where you should stop you searching. We would like to introduce you various tools on converting Vudu to iTunes.

Part 1: Tips You Should Know Before You Export Vudu Movies to iTunes

Before you try to export Vudu movies to iTunes, there are some tips you should know. Firstly, we know that Vudu is a free online movie streaming service that enables you thousands of movies and TV shows online. However, we need to know that all these streaming videos are actually Blu-ray/DVD titles.

Secondly, you need to download Vudu videos firstly with some kind of Vudu video downloader apps listed below including Vudu to Go, Video Downloader, and others. To transfer Vudu movies to iTunes library, you also need to know what video formats are supported by iTunes.

Video formats supported by iTunes: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats.

Therefore, you need to download and convert Vudu movies to MP4, M4V, MOV file formats for iTunes library. Then you only need to transfer the downloaded and converted Vudu videos to iTunes as you usually do.

Part 2: How to Download Vudu Movies for iTunes with Vudu to Go Application

As to getting Vudu videos to iTunes, there is an app called Vudu to Go that could help you do this. Firstly you will need the latest version of Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR. With these 2 plugins installed on your computer, you could make use of the Vudu to Go app to download Vudu movies for iTunes.

Follow the below steps to learn how to download Vudu videos with Vudu to Go app:

1. Download and install Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR on your computer.

2. Open Vudu app and select the movie you want to download.

3. Click the 'Download' option and then choose 'SD', 'HD' or 'HDX' option to start downloading process.

4. Then, open Vudu-to-Go app, login with your Vudu account.

5. You could then click the Download button on Vudu-to-Go app to download selected movie from your Vudu app you are watching.

With Vudu-to-Go app, you could easily download Vudu movies onto your computer. Then, you could import the downloaded Vudu movies to iTunes as you usually do.

Part 3: How to Download Vudu Movies on PC with Video Downloader

Also, to download Vudu movies on PC, you could make use of 3rd-party online streaming video downloader software tools. There are quite a lot of wonderful online video downloader tools. Leawo Video Downloader is one of the top-notch online video downloaders that could perform as a professional Vudu movie downloader to help you download Vudu movies.

Download Vudu Movies To Hard Drive

Leawo Video Downloader, a professional online video downloader program that could download video from 1000+ sites like youtube.com, facebook.com, vevo.com, veoh.com, etc., could perform as a perfect Vudu movie downloader to download Vudu movies without any quality loss. It provides multiple download options of target Vudu video in different resolutions, quality and formats for you to download.

Download and install this video downloader program on your computer and then launch it. Follow the below steps to learn how to download Vudu movies to computer.

The below steps would show you how to download video from Facebook in HD with Leawo Video Downloader.

Step 1: Set output directory

After downloading and installing Leawo Video Downloader (a module of Leawo Prof. Media), kick off Leawo Video Downloader. Click the wheel icon on the top-right corner and then navigate to the “Downloader” tab to set output directory in the “Save videos to” box. You could even set the home page of your downloader browser within Leawo Prof. Media.

Step 2: Find target video

Open the “Download” module and then copy and paste the URL of Vudu movie you want to download into the browser address bar. Then, hit the Enter key on your keyboard to get target Vudu movie.

Step 3: Choose Vudu movie to download

On the right sidebar, Leawo Video Downloader would provide multiple download options in different resolutions, quality and formats. Choose the one you want to download. Note: There are audio-only files that have no video content, therefore you need to choose carefully.

Download Vudu Movies To External Hard Drive Mac Os

Step 4: Download Vudu movies

Then, after determining which Vudu movie to download, click the download icon next to it to start downloading Vudu movie you want. You could then view all the downloading Vudu movies on the “Downloading” tab and then open “Downloaded” tab to view all downloaded movies from Vudu or other sites.

Update 2020/06/22: Leawo Video Downloader has disabled Vudu video downloading feature. This might be added in the future.

Part 4: How to Convert Downloaded Vudu Videos for iTunes

As mentioned above, iTunes only accepts video files saved in MP4, MOV and M4V formats. Now, with Vudu movies downloaded to your computer, you might have found that the downloaded Vudu movies are not saved in MP4, MOV or M4V file formats. In such case, you could make use of the Convert module built in Leawo Prof. Media. That is Leawo Video Converter, a professional video converter program that could help you convert YouTube to Apple TV, make iPhone ringtones from YouTube video, convert YouTube to MP3, etc. Actually, as a professional video and audio converter combo, it could convert video files between hundreds of video formats like FLV to MP4, MP4 to MKV, MP4 to AVI, AVI to MKV, etc. It even allows you to edit downloaded Vudu movies like adding watermark, applying 3D effect, etc.

Follow the below steps to learn how to convert downloaded Vudu movies to iTunes compatible MP4, MOV, or M4V video files with Leawo Video Converter in detail.

Step 1: Add downloaded Vudu movies to “Convert” module

Under the “Downloaded” tab, right click downloaded Vudu movies and then choose “Add to Convert” option to add downloaded Vudu movies to Convert module.

Step 2: Set output format

Click the button next to 'Add Photo' button and then choose 'Change' option to enter the Profile panel. Then, successively open 'Format > Common Video' group to choose MP4 Video, MOV Video or M4V Video as output format since iTunes accepts MP4, MOV and M4V.

If you need, you could even adjust the output file format parameters like video codec, bit rate, aspect ratio, frame rate, audio codec, audio bit rate, channel, sample rate, etc. To do these, just click the “Edit” button on the drop-down panel after you click the button right before the big green “Convert” button.

Step 3: Set output directory

After setting output format, click the big green “Convert” button to set output directory in the “Save to” box of the sidebar.

Make sure you have selected a drive with enough space. After setting output directory, click the bottom 'Convert' button to start converting downloaded Vudu movies to MP4, MOV, or M4V files. The conversion will last for a few minutes, depending on the file size and computer performance.

When the conversion finishes, you have got downloaded Vudu movies in iTunes compatible MP4, MOV, or M4V file format. You could then freely import the converted Vudu movies to iTunes library.

As a professional video converter software program, Leawo Video Converter performs far more than a simple video converter program. It also enables you to edit videos like adding watermark and 3D effect, adding subtitles, snapping screenshot, etc.

Part 5: How to Import Converted Vudu Videos to iTunes

Now, you have successfully turned Vudu movies into iTunes compatible video format. What you need to do now is import the converted Vudu movies to iTunes library. Follow the below steps to learn how to import Vudu movies to iTunes in detail:

1. Open iTunes on your computer.

2. Click on 'File > Add to Library' options consecutively.

3. Browse for the converted Vudu movie files from your computer hard drive. You could hold down Control (Windows) or Command (Mac) as you click to load and add multiple Vudu movies to iTunes library.

4. After selecting converted Vudu movies, click the 'Open' button to start to importing converted Vudu movies to iTunes library.

5. Now, you have added converted Vudu movies to iTunes. You could now transfer the imported Vudu movies to iOS devices or play back imported Vudu movies within iTunes as you like.

Actually, you could directly drag and drop converted Vudu movies to iTunes library for adding Vudu movies to iTunes after downloading and converting.