VideosZ review

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First impression

Very clean and professional front page gives you a glimpse of the site's format and available movies.
Very nice-looking. A pretty standard format, with a search engine that can do genre, studio, series, and actress. Doesn't look like that's breaking any new ground, but the prospect of having 400+ full-length movies at my fingertips for just a monthly fee is pretty enticing!

Our opinion

Well, it looks like they're going to live up to their promises. Quite simply put, Videosz has hundreds of full-length DVDs avialable from such studios as Jill Kelly Productions, Red Light District and Adam & Eve.

You've most likely seen this format before in pay-per-view sites, but this one is all inclusive. Very impressive just looking at the front members page.

The top toolbar has links to the search engine, new releases (and future releases), and a link to the most downloaded movies on the site. Today's releases are listed right in the main body of the page and tomorrow's releases are right under those for a sneak peek at what's to come. On the left is another toolbar that gives you access to your personal settings, including your favorite vids and account info. Under that you have a whole DVD browsing menu, complete with scrolldowns for genre, studio, and series. This extremely handy, tried-and-true format is especially nice when you don't have to just settle for the trailers!

Clicking on a title brings you to that DVD's page. Again, very impressive layout here, with each scene from the movie seperated with 3 thumbnails and three different formats for download (I'll get to the specifics of those later). You can stream to the scenes or download them, which is just fine, though for the longer scenes you may wish for smaller pieces - the high quality 20 minute scenes run over 200MB and will put quite a strain on your connection. Every major genre is represented very well in this collection, though this probably isn't yet the place for you extreme fetish folks. With the exception of Adam & Eve, most of the studios represented are are pretty B-list, but with an update of at least one whole DVD per day, you're bound to find what you're looking for if you stick around.

The production value of the videos ranges from "Dude with a camera who somehow convinced a girl to be naked in front of him" to "AVN Award quality." Again, with about 8 studios represented, it's not possible to make a blanket statement about production value, but it's pretty safe to say that even the most discerning viewer (that's me) will find something to suit his fancy. The largest format, sizewise, is the AVI format which are 480X360 DiVX encoded videos. These videos look great at any size - near DVD quality, though even with the newest codecs, I still get some grain at the larger screen sizes just as I do with almost all DiVX stuff. The mid-sized format (MPEG) videos are also 480X360 with a standard MPEG encoding.

But these look very very nice. I'd stick with this format even for full screen viewing. The WMV format is a little smaller at 320X240 and doesn't look nearly as good in full screen mode as the larger formats, but even this is very watchable. Very impressive encoding all around here.

Conclusion

Put plainly, Videosz is pretty close to perfect. The navigation is smooth and intuitive, the selection is great and keeps growing, and the quality is bar none some of the better I've seen. Sure, it'd be nice to be able to download an entire movie in one go and yes, it would be nice if the scenes were broken up a little more. But for the price of one new DVD, you get access to over 400, plus at least 30 new ones per month. I'll take that over the video store any day!

[Update 04/2006] Apparently VideosZ are now using DRM to protect their videos from unauthorized copying. This means you can only watch the videos as long as you are a member of the site.

Prices

Credit Card, Online Check, Phone

30 Days: $29.95



Preview gallery: Check out the free preview pictures provided by VideosZ