Gadgetory

hey everyone brandon minimun here guest editor for John for lakers calm and this is a continuation of the video series on the Voodoo set-top box now in this video we're going to talk about the setup of the device and then we're going to actually go over the remote because this is one of the strangest smallest weirdest-looking remotes that they make for any set-top box we're going to talk about whether it's actually a usable remote and then we're going to go through the whole menu system of the voodoo box and I'll show you what it's like to to pick a movie to download a movie and then to watch a movie and all the other stuff that goes along with that so I'll see you in a sec alright guys so here we are down on my set up here and as you can see the voodoo box is a nice looking attractive device it doesn't take up much room so it's about two or three inches high here it matches nicely if you have black components or silver components like I do and let me turn it around but first I want to you don't want to point out two things to these lights on the side the one on the left is a standby light it turns kind of orange when it's not on and then the green light is your network light so when you have a network connection going it will stay green it'll turn red if your network goes offline or something like that so let's turn it around alright so let me get a little bit closer here okay so here we are a little bit closer now this is the antenna and what's great about the the remote is that it doesn't use IR it uses radio frequency so you can be behind the couch or you know on the stairs or kind of far away from your voodoo box and still have it worked quite well so that's really great here's how I have it connected I have it with my optical audio cable going to my receiver down here and then I've got the hdmi going to the TV up there and the ethernet cable of course and to the right of that is the power cable so really not that many connectors that's involved here as you would expect with a set-top box okay so i will talk about the remote right now now the remote only has five buttons so we have a power button back button play/pause button a voodoo button which goes to the home screen and a more button so you're probably wondering and of course it's a scroll wheel you're probably wondering how can you operate a set-top box how can you search for movies with just five buttons like this well I'll tell you what it's very easy the scroll wheel really comes in handy when you're flipping through letters are trying to find various titles in their catalog and what's great about the remote is it's completely economic so you kind of hold the remote like this you put your thumb on the scroll wheel and your hand just wraps gently around it and it's perfect for right or left handers one of the problems with the remote is that it's dark so if the lights are off you're not going to see the buttons too well and they're not backlit so you can't tell what button you're hitting so that's say you'll probably have to memorize where the buttons are and it's not that big of a deal considering that there are only five buttons and a scroll wheel alright guys so here we are on the Voodoo main menu and you get this when you turn on your device when you turn on the box and also when you press the voodoo button on the remote control now there are so many ins and outs of this and it would probably take me an hour to show you everything but I really want to give you an idea for the experience that you can expect to have with the voodoo player how how long it takes to get from screen to screen what it's like to buy a movie and there are two kind of components of the voodoo box that i'm going to show you one is movies how to download a movie and watch a movie and the other one is the Voodoo labs section which lets you go to YouTube Flickr Picasa it's kind of a new experimental project that really brings a ton of content to the Voodoo box I think it's one of the ways that the voodoo box stands above other set-top boxes out there so anyway this is your main screen you can flip through the featured titles here quite easily with the scroll wheel but I want to go to explore catalog because I want to download a movie right now I'm going to go to search by title over here and i'm going to type hulk for the incredible hook and what it does is it searches as you type and wow it came up pretty fast actually on the left there you'll see the list of matches and right at the top is the incredible hulk so i'm going to click on that one and it will be take me to the information screen and this is what you get on the right in the upper right you get a synopsis below that you get information playtime rating year that sort of thing genre below that it tells you the format's that it's available in now this is kind of important especially if you if you have a high-definition box you have standard definition which is kind of crappy you have HD which is probably around 1080i maybe 720p then you have the HDX which is the top of the top 1080p can pletely uncompressed so the audio is fantastic very discreet channels that the picture is incredible it's not quite blu-ray but it's almost blu-ray so let's say I want to do the HDX so I'm going to do over here on the left you see where the selection boxes I'm gonna do rent from 399 it's going to show me the three different prices depending on what I want the HDX is 599 for 24-hour rental period this is kind of in the higher end of the price usually they're about 499 but the incredible hulk is just out so that it's priced higher so if I click on it it says rent for 599 and it will be available in two hours I know what you're thinking two hours are you kidding me i don't want to wait two hours well here's the thing the HD xvideos are so big that even over a high-speed line it takes a long time to download that said if you want to get the HD version it will start immediately and and simultaneously if you want to have the HDX version download you can go to any other movie in their catalog and start watching it immediately let me demonstrate that so let's go to the grinch horton hears a who let's start watching it in you can't rent this one it looks like snot out let's do this movie and rent and I am going to choose HD ready to watch and watch how fast this is it's going to come up on the screen probably in about 10 seconds even though i'm downloading a BD x title at the same time so watch now and here we are the movies already starting while i'm downloading a pdx title so it's really amazing how fast the how fast this all works and how easy and intuitive it is so if we go back to the main screen and we go to my voodoo we can kind of see our rentals right now and what's being downloaded so I'm going to go to my rentals and it shows me these are all the movies that I've been watching lately we have the incredible hulk right here and it's in download queue there's another movie that's in the download queue and when it's done the hook will start downloading ok so that was movies on the Voodoo player movie the movie experience on the Voodoo player is fantastic it's one of the best that I've ever seen on any set-top box the movies are quickly available to download the selection is pretty darn good it's not perfect I have run into some movies that aren't available to download yet but voodoo is a startup company they're starting to bring on more and more titles all the time ok so let's go into the next section of this voodoo labs this is a new thing this kind of brings a whole new realm of content to your voodoo box and I think it's really important ok and we can do a few things here hopefully you can see this we can do YouTube we can do on demand TV look at g4tv NBC MSNBC CNN a lot of that kind of stuff TV channels that you watch on your on your regular channel then we have picasa let's do picasa because what you can do is actually log into your account if you have picasa online and you can flick through all your pictures so this is a demo and it kind of shows you movie quotes while you're waiting so you don't get bored but Wow looking at pictures on a on an LCD television is amazing they're coming up right now and this is kind of the demo that comes on the on the Voodoo box and so so imagine you've just uploaded some pictures to picasa and you're doing a slideshow for your family or friends pretty cool stuff alright let's go back and let's go to youtube you can watch every YouTube video that is on youtube com so I am going to go to I'm going to search for John for lakers bring up the john for lakers channel for John for lakers and hopefully get one of John's videos on the screen John for and that should be enough done up there's one right here John for lakers and let's go more from the author so we can get the John for lakers youtube channel right on the screen here all John's videos so here is the man himself and we can play it full screen it's loading it takes just a second and of course the sound us off right now and what's really great is that I can leave John on the right side of my screen while eyebrows as other videos or even go through the rest of YouTube so a really great interface for YouTube from voodoo labs so let's move on from here okay so let's go to on demand TV there's a lot of different content here so we can go to science and technology we've got David Pogue from the new york times we've got Walt Mossberg from The Wall Street Journal we've got some NASA things National Geographic and it's all really good quality some of its HD some of its SD but it all works really well and you know 10 seconds or less to to watch it on the screen and here it is so you can spend a really long time if you never download any movies at all just in the voodoo lab section of the of voodoo and there's also some games on here which is kind of funny you can play freecell there's one called Cooper which allows you to shoot down asteroids and that sort of thing so guys I know it was a long video but I hope I gave you a really good feel for how the Voodoo player works with you and kind of the experience that it will bring you in the next video we're going to cover kind of the pros and the cons wrap it all up and i'll tell you if this is something that you should buy and kind of give you an overall opinion on it so that's it for now see you soon