Vongo Videos

Posted on July 14, 2006 2 Comments

The family is about to head off for a week long vacation. Last week, I was pondering the idea of looking into ripping some video from our DVD collection to my laptop when a friend sent me a link to Vongo. As they tout over 1600 titles, I figured I’d have a look. (you can sign up for a “free” 2 week trial)

The website is this slick shiny flash thing and it took me a while to figure out what I was after, but long story short: download the client. From the client you register and do all the searching. Grab movies to download now or schedule for download later (I set mine up to just go in the early am so as not to hog bandwidth). You also watch the movies through the client.

The good news: Downloaded movie quality is great. Size isn’t too horrible — the movies I grabbed all appear to be around the 940 - 1.3GB range. The Starz live video stream is rather nifty to have around while I’m working in the home office.

The bad news: For a family with younger kids, the selection for younger folks isn’t all that great. And you have to be careful not to grab a Pay-per-view title as that’ll cost extra. In fact, overall, the selection is a bit of the limiting factor here. While I found a fair amount of movies I personally wouldn’t mind seeing, I dunno how much movie watching on my laptop I’ll be doing after next week’s trip.

Neat service and at only $10 a month, not a bad price. The two week trial thing is a great way to try it out and get a feel for it. And now we have “National Treasure” and “13 Going on 30″ for the trip. As the library isn’t as deep as I was hoping for, I don’t know that I’ll keep the membership after the initial 2 weeks, but I may sign up again for future trips.

That last sentence sums it up for me: I just don’t see me or my family watching videos on a laptop unless there’s a trip involved. Wonder if we’re the norm with that attitude?

Tags: video, vongo