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Impressions: Vuze

Written by Pacdan

Well, actually I’ve been using the Vuze client for a while - but only for the Azureus bittorrent client, not the Vuze service itself. Today, however, I actually decided to check out what was on Vuze and ended up downloading a low budget post-apocalyptic affair called Afterworld, which comes in five episode packs. Downloading was lightning fast, using my entire connection speed, which was very nice given that the files were about 150MB - reasonable but not tiny. Unfortunately, the navigation looking for content on Vuze is slow and extremely clumsy. Although everything is sorted by category, I still found it was hard to find stuff of real interest among all the junk and movie trailers. This is not a replacement for YouTube by any means, and if they expect this to take off as the future of IPTV they sure had better get their interface a whole lot better very soon. Once I actually got to watching the video, the picture quality was excellent and the integrated player works very well - I’m assuming you’re stuck with it for advertising purposes, though I haven’t actually investigated that. Unfortunately it’s just too much inconvenience to become something I’ll use that often unless there’s something I really want on there. Also, the games on Vuze section is flat out stupid. It does give brief trial periods, but for the games I looked at it was only like 15 minutes before you’d have to buy. I’m not a fan of getting games via digital download anyways, but bad selection and far too high prices are not going to lead to this ever becoming a competitor with Steam, which, while I don’t like it either, is much better. A better idea would be to also allow the distribution of user created freeware games over bittorrent. I can definitely see a potential market for that type of service, though unfortunately you would always need to be on the lookout for malicious code. As it stands now, the Vuze service is conceptually nice but very unimpressive in execution.

The Afterworld series, on the other hand, rocks! While I’ve only watched the first 10 episodes (totally about 30 minutes) the interesting, albeit totally clichéd, storyline kept me interested, I’ve already downloaded up to episode 20 (of more than 100). The CGI is really bad in places, but this is more than made up for by the art direction and voice acting, both of which are very well done. It’s enjoyable, even if a long ways away from TV quality.