Archived Criterion Streaming Discussion

[Murdoch]

Looks like Miramax got themselves a Hulu Plus channel too.

Nothing earth-shatteringly rare up now, but hopefully if they aren't planning on putting their catalog out on DVD, they will at least put some of it up here.

(Exotica, Through the Olive Trees.....)

The uncut The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is now available through the Miramax channel.

[Tribe]

Looks like Miramax got themselves a Hulu Plus channel too.

Nothing earth-shatteringly rare up now, but hopefully if they aren't planning on putting their catalog out on DVD, they will at least put some of it up here.

(Exotica, Through the Olive Trees.....)

The uncut The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is now available through the Miramax channel.

I wonder what happened...I mean, Criterion at one time openly confirmed they had acquired the rights to The Cook, the Thief. Clearly, someone goofed regarding the rights situation.

[Gary Gnu]

That's weird. I was just wondering a few days ago what happened with Criterion's plans to release that film. Did Miramax just change its mind? I know it's not that simple, but I'm surprised that Miramax really wanted the rights back.

[Jeff]

A Man Escaped has been added.

[Harmonov]

A Man Escaped has been added.

A former New Yorker title, yes? That bodes well perhaps...

[Peacock]

Criterion haven't made any deals with New Yorker; presumedly this is one of the titles ala Weekend which NYer let drop before going bust (like L'Argent as well I believe?). I wonder if the same happened with all their other Bressons....

[matrixschmatrix]

These aren't under the Criterion banner, but I was excited to find out five Rifftrax movies have just been added to Hulu- Maniac, Planet of the Dinosaurs, Voodoo Man, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Night of the Living Dead.

[Perkins Cobb]

Started my Hulu Plus free trial this weekend and watched The Plough and the Stars and I Was a Teenage Zombie (on a 46" plasma, via my Sony Blu-ray player). Probably neither of which was an ideal test-drive candidate, but I was unimpressed nonetheless: serious macro-blocking in both, plus some jerky motion and other odd digital flaws in Plough.

Not sure how much of this is the master and how much is Hulu, but I suspect it's a little of both. Sampled a few minutes of Princess From the Moon and that seemed to have a much higher-quality encode. But I doubt I'll spend any time or money sifting through the Hulu exclusives for new transfers until after I've been through basically every disc release. Maybe by the time I catch up to streaming, the technical side will have caught up with my standards.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think a lot of that has to do with the streaming speed you're getting- I've noticed that I can watch the same movie twice and get two totally different levels of picture quality on there.

[jwd5275]

Out of curiousity, what are your results with Netflix streaming?

[Minkin]

Everything Goes Wrong (Suzuki)
Flowing (Naruse)
Les Grandes Manoeuvres (Clair)
Nine Days of One Year (Mikhail Romm)
Une Parisienne (Michel Boisrond)
The Third Shadow Warrior (Umetsugu Inoue)

[knives]

Has anyone else noticed that Malle's May Fools is up? I thought that title was separate from the big group that they got so it should be notable.

[heredity4me]

Started my Hulu Plus free trial this weekend and watched The Plough and the Stars and I Was a Teenage Zombie (on a 46" plasma, via my Sony Blu-ray player). Probably neither of which was an ideal test-drive candidate, but I was unimpressed nonetheless: serious macro-blocking in both, plus some jerky motion and other odd digital flaws in Plough.

Not sure how much of this is the master and how much is Hulu, but I suspect it's a little of both. Sampled a few minutes of Princess From the Moon and that seemed to have a much higher-quality encode. But I doubt I'll spend any time or money sifting through the Hulu exclusives for new transfers until after I've been through basically every disc release. Maybe by the time I catch up to streaming, the technical side will have caught up with my standards.

I assume some of the problem has to do with the two films you watched aren't in HD on Hulu, but Princess from the Moon is. Hulu doesn't do a good job of showing which films are in HD and which are not.

[Sam T.]

Started my Hulu Plus free trial this weekend and watched The Plough and the Stars and I Was a Teenage Zombie (on a 46" plasma, via my Sony Blu-ray player). Probably neither of which was an ideal test-drive candidate, but I was unimpressed nonetheless: serious macro-blocking in both, plus some jerky motion and other odd digital flaws in Plough.

Not sure how much of this is the master and how much is Hulu, but I suspect it's a little of both. Sampled a few minutes of Princess From the Moon and that seemed to have a much higher-quality encode. But I doubt I'll spend any time or money sifting through the Hulu exclusives for new transfers until after I've been through basically every disc release. Maybe by the time I catch up to streaming, the technical side will have caught up with my standards.

I've been subscribing since about a month after the initial announcement, and I haven't had those problems with hulu at all, though I have seen a lot of pixilizing and stuff when watching *netflix*. Most of my discs are blus, though I have a few eclipse sets, and while the pq on hulu is nowhere near what it is on criterion blus it has always been as good or better than criterion dvds, and often seems better (less compressed) than the blu rays put out by other companies. Comparing my Eclipse sets (Kaurismaki, Oshima, Klein, and Makavejev) all looked as good as the dvds except for the Oshimas which looked even better (I guess because they're newer transfers, presented in 720p).

I've been watching both the discs and the streams (via an xbox) on an old 36" Sony 1080i crt, but also watch hulu on my phone sometimes, where the quality has been less consistent, but also pretty good. Your setup might reveal flaws in the source material that mine doesn't, but I'd be surprised if what looked better than dvd on my screen looked worse than dvd on yours.

I haven't watched the specific films you mentioned, but I think there is a number of variables here besides the quality hulu is able to stream or the quality of the master files, including the kind of connection you have, how much internet traffic there is in your neighborhood at the time, and the software on the blu ray player handling the decoding. My sense is that hulu (like netflix) will downshift to lower resolution and higher compression when it senses a problem, and the problem may well be with sony's software, or with the number of other people on your street also watching hulu.

I assume, if you're using wifi, you've tried wired internet to see if there's any improvement, right?

I'm not trying to be a big cheerleader for hulu. I mean, their search interface is horrible, and they've been a lot slower to implement special features (specifically commentaries) than I'd have liked, but on the whole picture quality has been as much of an improvement over netflix as criterion dvds are over discount bin dvds.

I hope none of this comes off as smug or confrontational (I don't often post here, and when I do I always seem to piss people off without meaning to, so I guess I have bad netiquette skills). Hulu+ has been great for me - well worth the cost despite some obvious problems. In my experience pq has never been one of those problems.

[Perkins Cobb]

I'm using wired, via a cable modem. I've had Netflix streaming for a while and I have had good viewing experiences that way ... if their master is HD, if it's non-peak hours, and if neither Netflix nor Sony nor my ISP decide to have an outage while I'm watching. The pile-up of variables is really my main issue with streaming -- too many ways for a screening to go sour. (For instance, I also watched Ford's The Hurricane via Netflix streaming the same evening. Probably the same master as the OOP MGM disc, so not great, but adequate; except that for the last third of the movie, there was a slight stammer in the horizontal motion. This occurred only during this section of the film -- when I went back to the beginning, it played fine -- so I'm guessing the problem is with Netflix, not ISP traffic. But it's hard to be certain.) Whereas, with physical media, if I've read the disc reviews and checked for scratches beforehand, I'm far less likely to have a movie wrecked by an unpleasant surprise in the middle of watching.

So I was rating Hulu vs. Netflix streaming. I guess they come out about the same technically, in that anything obscure enough for me to want to watch in that format is likely to be an old master or an un-QC'd encode, and have the expected problems. That Criterion content sure looks lonely on Hulu, though, because I couldn't find anything else at all worth watching.

How are you seeing which films on Hulu are in HD? That info is, indeed, hard to find.

Nine Days of One Year is a terrific film, incidentally -- worth watching even on Hulu.

[jwd5275]

The only way to see what is HD content is through the website. One can either hover over the film to get info including whether it is in HD or filter the films to show HD only.

Unfortunately, like Netflix, Hulu's set-top streaming interface is leaves much to be desired and doesn't specify HD (at least that I have noticed...)

[Sam T.]

Well, you've thought of everything I thought of. I'm stumped. I would say that, since netflix has been in the game a little longer than hulu, maybe they've had more of a chance to tweak the software they develop with partners like sony or microsoft, but I've no idea why that would result in compression artifacts that you're seeing but I'm not. Maybe your TV just doesn't like hulu for some reason.

I guess, just for the benefit of others reading this, I just want to say that my experience has been good. To me the hulu streams look, on my setup(s), as compressed or less compressed than dvds made from the same transfers. They do not look as good as blu rays, but if you're expecting "dvd quality" you shouldn't be disappointed.

I guess the only way to know for sure how it will look in your living room is to try it out for a month. The worst thing that can happen is you'll have wasted $8.

How are you seeing which films on Hulu are in HD? That info is, indeed, hard to find.

Nine Days of One Year is a terrific film, incidentally -- worth watching even on Hulu.

Thanks for the recommendation!

When you're watching something on hulu on your computer, and you mouse over the picture, there's a little sprocket/gear icon that pops up. Click it and it will give you a choice of resolutions, sometimes the max is 480 and sometimes it's 720, depending on if the source material is a HD transfer. Most older titles are only 480, but newer ones, including some dvd only titles like recent Eclipse sets, are available in 720.

There may be a way to tell what the resolution is when you're watching on something other than a computer, but that's probably different on different hardware.

[jwd5275]

Just added:

Confidentially Yours - Truffaut
All These Women - Bergman
Eva - Molander

[domino harvey]

All These Women - Bergman
Eva - Molander

No doubt part of some forthcoming (though probably separate) Eclipse sets. Eva's definitely my favorite of Bergman's scripted-but-not-directed output

[knives]

Molander? Yes, I love the two films Kino just released.

[Minkin]

I noticed that the Godzilla/Gojira films are down and are now part of Westchester Films - although be it still with the Criterion designed title treatment/image. Granted, they don't have streaming rights, but can anyone else dig up what exactly happened? Or if a Godzilla/Gojira Blu release was/is ever possible? How does Classic Media fit in all of this?

-Edit

I found Westchester's website - which includes a number of Criterion titles (Hopscotch, Faces, Killing of a Chinese Bookie and even Blood for Dracula and the Caidan trust titles). I wonder why Westchester then only wanted Godzilla/Gojira for their channel (well, I suppose it's the best thing going for their channel). Any other Westchester titles then feasible for distribution then (from their website)

[ianungstad]

I bet they have The Neon Bible. They hinted on Facebook ages ago that they were sitting on some Davies. Surprised that Winchester aren't repping the Kazan titles.

[knives]

Don't expect a DVD for Confidentially Yours any time soon. The transfer they put up is very ugly. Hopefully it gets better as it goes along.

Edit: The transfer doesn't get any better, but I have to say this is arguably the second best Truffaut I've seen.

[zedz]

I bet they have The Neon Bible.

I'll be interested to see it again, but this seemed to me far and away Davies' worst film when it was released. Even though they'd be duplicating the BFI, I think they'd be better off tackling one of the trilogies.

[ianungstad]

Oh it's just a hunch but I think they are sitting on Terence Davies trilogy and The Long Day Closes as well. The Neon Bible is the only Davies film that Winchester reps.