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Content
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| Quality : |
17.5 / 20 |
| Quantity : |
15.0 / 15 |
| Entertain : |
14.0 / 15 |
| Updates : |
10.0 / 10 |
| Exclusive : |
2.0 / 05 |
| Download : |
4.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
62.5 / 70 |
| Navigation |
| Easy : |
8.5 / 10 |
| Features : |
4.0 / 05 |
| Design : |
4.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
17.0 / 20 |
| Other |
| Originality : |
4.0 / 05 |
| Hard Facts : |
5.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
9.0 / 10 |
Scoring Criteria New
New Update!
As of Aug 15th, 07, price of a site is no longer factored into the overall score/rank. |
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1. Lots of videos here.
2. Nice and cheap!
3. Good download/viewing options.
1. Quality could be improved a bit.
2. Navigation is just average/good.
"With some nice improvements here, Download Pass is better than ever." |
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If you've read any other of my reviews of a video site, you'll know already that I love video sites. This review came up last minute, but I was pretty excited when I first saw the site since it looks to be right up my alley. It's called Download Pass, and they offer up fully-downloadable videos as their main content, which is all right by me. They were charging $30 a month, but already lowered that to $15 a month which is a great deal. They have some stiff competition in the category, so it'll be interesting to see how they hold up.
Right off the bat, the site looks pretty similar to other video sites we've reviewed. They have over 500 DVD's online already, which is pretty huge (especially since the site is on the new side). They have 31 categories in their menu to browse through, which will bring up the scenes that fall into that category. Along the top, they tell you both how many scenes, and how many titles (DVD's) match that, but it appears you can only browse through the scenes which is odd. If you click on the DVD title, though, you're taken to the DVD info page which is right in line with what I'd expect to see. They list the actors (with links to their other movies), as well as the available scenes which you can watch or download right from here. They don't give much other info on the movie, such as which studio or even a description unfortunately.
Browsing and navigation is good, but not great overall. Once you pick the category, that's the best you can do as far as searching. You can't narrow that down any more unfortunately. Also, they list eight scenes per page (which links to about nine pages at a time), which can lead to a lot of clicking to get through the list. I think adding the option of browsing video titles from the category search would help alleviate that.
Once you're ready to watch a clip, you've got a few more decisions to make with all their viewing options. First, decide if you want to watch the whole scene, or if you want to watch it in smaller clips. Then, choose between three quality options. Finally, you'll hit a button to either view it in your browser, or download it to your computer. They all seem to be in Windows Media format, though the download link requires that you actually download the file (it doesn't start playing right away in your player). They also have some screen caps available if you want a better preview of the scene. Download speeds are quick, maxing out our current connection at 350KB/sec. or so. The video quality is good, but honestly it wasn't as good as I was expecting. The high-quality version comes in at 570x380 and 760kbps. There's a bit of fuzziness to the picture quality that I'm not sure why it's there. Once the action has started, it gets a little worse as the movement becomes too much. With all these video sites popping up nowadays, I think it would help them quite a bit to improve the quality if at all possible.
They have a bonus site section that's filled with decent extras, but I wouldn't call them sites as much as third-party plugins. The site overall is a bit of a bittersweet package. First, it's cheap and there are a lot of videos online. On the other hand, the navigation is average (good) and the quality could use some improvement. Tweaking those two problems would help tremendously, although I'm sure it would be difficult to do (especially the quality problems). New movies don't have dates (except for two, which came two days apart) so I'm not sure how often the site grows. It's definitely worth a look to see if you prefer it to our other top-rated video sites, but personally (although it's a pretty good site overall) those small negatives take it out of the running for a top spot.
| 1st Follow-Up Review |
Review: 09-15-06 |
Okay, let me give you the long and the skinny, Minny: there are more videos than last time (cool!), but the video quality is the same and could be improved even more now. Seriously, videos are up over the 600 mark which is nice to see. There's no real update schedule posted that I found, but I'm glad to see the site growing. The rest of the site remains the same overall. The one area I'd really like to see improved first is in the quality of the videos. The trend lately is at least 640x480 and 1000kbps, if not more. Otherwise, it's a decent site at a great price, and is worth a look for DVD fans.
Score decreased from 86.6 to 86.4.
| 2nd Follow-Up Review |
Review: 02-23-07 |
Wow, things are looking even a little better around here lately! The first news is the growth of course, with a ton of new DVD's online, and updates coming faster than ever. There are multiple daily DVD additions now which really help get things moving. Also bumped up is the quality here to around 1000kbps, though that's just bringing them back up to the average of other video sites these days. To really stand out, I wouldn't mind seeing an even larger increase soon. A couple new browse features round out the additions here (including a search feature) to help you get around easier. The price is still the same, so I've got nothing to really complain about too much! Things are looking good, and it's nice to have some good competition in the DVD porn world.
Score increased from 86.4 to 90.5.
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