A word of warning about UV (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Donahue]

Greetings all,

We have had many a debate regarding physical vs. digital media on this site. Myself, I have gone back and forth, seeing advantages to both. Today I have finally picked a side...

Viva La Blu-Ray

If you may have missed reading about it on other forums, many users had a large amount of movies turn up missing from Vudu. I personally had around 200 titles vanish. To be clear, these are movies that are still available on Vudu's site, and are all still in your UV locker, but as far as Vudu is concerned, you no longer own them. Vudu was notified on their forums, and they said they were working with UV to figure it out. After 5 days, they just posted this response:

"It appears that UV finally resolved their issue with large UV lockers and having them sync up with UV providers. Our engineers have investigated the issue and all looks fine from our end. So it seems that many large UV lockers contain rights that do not transfer over to Vudu for various reasons. For example, if you show 1000 movie rights in UV, that does not necessarily mean you'll have 1000 movies on Vudu. Many user UV accounts contain duplicate rights for the same movie, invalid ALIDs, and/or international ALIDs. We do not support ALIDs that are meant for international use, therefore those titles will not import into Vudu. So if you have a particular movie in your UV locker that will not import into Vudu, then it most likely has an ALID issue. Since the ALID is created by the provider with whom you acquired the movie with, only they can update the ALID to allow it to import into Vudu. You would need to contact that providers support channel and have them resolve the ALID issue for you."

I just offer this nonsense to anyone who might still be deciding if they feel safe going "entirely digital" or not.

I no longer do.

 

[Sam Posten]

This is why I stick to iTunes.

 

[[email protected]]

This is a porting issue Vudu will have to figure out. Nobody I know of has lost a single movie in their UV library....patience.

 

[Patrick Donahue]

Nobody I know of has lost a single movie in their UV library....patience.

I don't see that anybody claimed they did, nor did anybody say it wouldn't eventually be fixed.

It certainly isn't the kind of thing you deal with with the discs on your shelves, though. That's all the post was meant to say...

 

[skylark68]

The only way I can ever lose my physical media is by physical theft, acts of God, or global thermonuclear war. I'll take my chances on physical.

 

[[email protected]]

I don't see that anybody claimed they did, nor did anybody say it wouldn't eventually be fixed.

It certainly isn't the kind of thing you deal with with the discs on your shelves, though. That's all the post was meant to say...

No problem. I wasn't responding directly to your post, just the problem and peoples reactions in general. You are right though, a disc on your shelf will ALWAYS be there. For some that might be the most important thing.

 

[[email protected]]

Just passing along fyi:

Today we tracked down a bug in the February 22 update of the UltraViolet Coordinator. It only affects users with Libraries over a certain size (500+ in the case of Vudu, 1000+ in the case of most other UV retailers) who have performed one or more merges. The bug causes some rights to not be reported to the retailer. Rest assured that all your movies and TV shows are still there, but Vudu (and others) may not see all of them. The omissions are random, so, as some of you have discovered, if you add a new right it causes a refresh at Vudu that may make some rights reappear and others disappear.

We hope to have this fixed early next week, if not sooner. We're very sorry about the inconvenience.

--
Jim Taylor
CTO, UltraViolet

 

[[email protected]]

Some are reporting it's fixed already.

 

[KeithAP]

It certainly isn't the kind of thing you deal with with the discs on your shelves, though.

A disc on a shelf doesn't do anything for me. I need content on a TV, computer screen, streaming device, tablet or phone for that content to be useful.

The idea that having a disc means when you stick it in the device it was intended it will always play seems clearly wrong. It may be less likely to run into issues than a cloud service but it still has potential pitfalls.

Like everything else, each person must look at the pros and cons in regards to their particular needs and make a decision for themselves.

To me, the flexibility and convenience that Vudu offers is important enough that I don't care about potential issues that I have not experienced and may never experience.

Of course, for others, it is not the right choice. To each, their own.

-Keith

 

[Raul Marquez]

A disc on a shelf doesn't do anything for me. I need content on a TV, computer screen, streaming device, tablet or phone for that content to be useful.

The idea that having a disc means when you stick it in the device it was intended it will always play seems clearly wrong. It may be less likely to run into issues than a cloud service but it still has potential pitfalls.

Like everything else, each person must look at the pros and cons in regards to their particular needs and make a decision for themselves.

To me, the flexibility and convenience that Vudu offers is important enough that I don't care about potential issues that I have not experienced and may never experience.

Of course, for others, it is not the right choice. To each, their own.

-Keith

Keith,

But when you want to watch a movie that you OWN in VUDU, and it just "disappears" from your library that is just plain WRONG!

I'll stick with physical media and also have digital copies of my films on a hard drive which I can watch on several devices with PLEX.

Raul

 

[Patrick Donahue]

A disc on a shelf doesn't do anything for me. I need content on a TV, computer screen, streaming device, tablet or phone for that content to be useful.

The idea that having a disc means when you stick it in the device it was intended it will always play seems clearly wrong. It may be less likely to run into issues than a cloud service but it still has potential pitfalls.

Like everything else, each person must look at the pros and cons in regards to their particular needs and make a decision for themselves.

To me, the flexibility and convenience that Vudu offers is important enough that I don't care about potential issues that I have not experienced and may never experience.

Of course, for others, it is not the right choice. To each, their own.

-Keith

But if buying a Blu-ray that comes with the UV code gives you the best of both worlds for the same price, why not...?

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Oh my god, the CTO of Ultraviolet really is THAT Jim Taylor. He's gone over to The Dark Side!

 

[Sam Posten]

The frog?

 

[Joshua Clinard]

The frog?

 

[Mike Frezon]

?

 

[Sam Posten]

http://dvddemystified.com/jim/jhtaylor.htm

 

[Hello_ChoCho]

Nonetheless, if a physical copy is available, I prefer to own that. I may some day have to go digital, I will figure that out when & if. My D Theater D VHS movies still look damn good to (Vintage).