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Content
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| Quality : |
19.0 / 20 |
| Quantity : |
13.5 / 15 |
| Entertain : |
13.0 / 15 |
| Updates : |
9.5 / 10 |
| Exclusive : |
2.5 / 05 |
| Download : |
3.0 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
60.5 / 70 |
| Navigation |
| Easy : |
7.0 / 10 |
| Features : |
2.0 / 05 |
| Design : |
2.5 / 05 |
| sub-total : |
11.5 / 20 |
| Other |
| Temp Fill : |
8.0 / 10 |
| sub-total : |
8.0 / 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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| Editor: Spencer |
Initial Review: 04-13-04 |
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1. Nice option to have a CD of vids mailed each month.
2. Very good looking videos.
3. Daily updates.
1. Tough to find specific (or types) of videos.
2. DivX downloads take forever!
"To compete with the better video sites, I'd like to see better navigation, faster downloads, and a new design." |
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My first thought when I saw Fuckplex for the first time was that the design looked like a porn site from about five years ago. The black background mixed with the unpolished graphics just reminded me of older sites for some reason. The rest of the tour is pretty plain, with just some screen caps and a couple sample videos. The one cool thing is the master list of videos to give you an idea of just how much stuff they have here. Even though the dates aren't completely current here (they're from a month ago), you can still tell the update frequency which is at least daily! Good stuff.
After whipping out $30 to get in the door for a month (or just $6 for a three-day trial), they'll let you in the doors. A few interesting things I noticed on their join page were the fast download speeds (although even at that speed it was going to take about 13 minutes to get the clip), the option to have them send you a CD each month with clips of your choosing for FREE (you don't even pay shipping - good for those of you who don't have broadband), and software to let you put the videos on a CD to play on your TV. Those last two innovations are pretty cool since it's all included already; you might as well get the most out of your money (plus it makes the $30 monthly fee more worth it if you take advantage of those). They also let you know there's no download limit, which is a big plus as well.
The member's homepage is a little cheesy, but I guess it gets the job done. The menu at the top is what I used to get around the site; the icons below just confused me (not knowing what was what). Even though the site is mostly about movies, I decided to check out the photo galleries first to get those out of the way.
They had a few sections available to browse, but overall the content was just whatever. Most of the stuff seemed amateur in nature, and I doubt it's exclusive material. The pictures were a bit small, usually ending up around 650x450 or so. The quality itself was fine, but nothing too good or bad either way. About the only extra feature in the photos section was the ability to add it to your favorites, which can be accessed from the photos menu.
The video section is where the good stuff is hopefully. My first thought after clicking one of the links to enter it was that the page took a little long to load. There's lots of thumbnails it has to grab, and they didn't pop up as fast as I was used to; all in all it probably took a good 30-40 seconds to load the page. Also, there's no real good way to browse these pages that I saw. They basically divide things up into theaters, of which there are 18 right now. Each theater has about four or so pages of videos (eight videos per page). They do have a search feature which is pretty basic, but might help you find something specific a little quicker.
Each video is offered in four options. There's a low-, medium-, and high-quality Windows Media (that can either stream in your player, or be downloaded by right-clicking and hitting "save as"...), and a DivX download. My personal preference was the high-quality Windows Media, as it started playing relatively quickly and offered pretty good quality. They were 320x240 at just under 600kbps. This amounted to pretty good video, even at full screen! If you want the really good stuff, then you can get the DivX version; but be forewarned, I didn't get download speeds anywhere near what they promised (and we're on a 3mbps download connection). Instead of the cool 277KB/s. they were showing in their tour, I was closer to 70-80KB/s. which means the downloads would have taken 30-60 minutes just for one scene! The video looked good, but it wasn't worth the extra download time if you aren't really, really into that kind of stuff. The Windows Media version looked almost as good (although it's smaller at 320x240), and started playing much quicker.
My control group here is our current top three video sites: Ten.com, Climax Corner, and VideosZ. At $30 a month, it's up there tied as the most expensive one, which means it better offer up some good stuff. I do like the availability of a CD each month, but that's about the only thing they offer different from the rest (if you wanted to, you could burn any of the other site's videos to watch on your TV as well). The browsing is probably the worst out of all the sites, which definitely hurts. The video quality was up there as good as the rest of them. Since finding what you want to see is almost as important as the videos themselves for me, I'd have to say this site falls short. The high cost is a factor as well, since two of the other three sites are much cheaper. It's a decent site on its own, but compared to the others it just doesn't live up.
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