Customer Reviews

Ever try something new and everything works out just fine?
I fear change. I shy away from bleeding edge technology. I stay safe. There was no way I was going to install some commercial program that stays resident and runs in the background on my computer. (After all, it was probably written by cylons.) But then 'they' got me. What a dirty trick: BSG3 would be released in England next month, but not in the US for the indefinite future. If I wanted to watch BSG (which is the greatest program on television, bar none), I would have to risk installing 'Unbox.' As an avowed conspiracy theorist, you know what I thought about that. Grudgingly, I downloaded the Unbox Player and installed it. I had to turn the computer on and off a few more times than expected; but that's par for the course on most installations. Then I decided to splurge. I spent $1.99 to check out an episode. Seemed a safe risk for the money, and the software installation had gone so quickly I was left with time on my hands to monkey around with this 'Unbox' thing some more. So I logged in, spent my $1.99 and prayed. Just as I started to exhale, a little notice popped up in the bottom right-hand corner. Aha! I knew things were going too well. I peered at the little message window and it read, "Your video is now ready for viewing." Huh? This must be a trick. I opened the Videos section of the Unbox player, and there was BSG, begging to be played. So I just hit the button and prayed. The Gods of Kobol answered. I spent the next hour watching my favorite cylons play havoc with their tormented human pets. Nothing makes me happier. As other reviewers have noted, BSG3 spends more time on character psychology, etc., etc. But it is still blessed with a sufficient amount of random violence, special effects, and surprising concepts to guarantee your satisfaction. Needless to say, I downloaded the entire season, plugged in the S-video cable (everything looks better on a large screen), and stayed up late for a few nights. The only downside of this 'Unbox' thing is that you need a megadrive to accomodate the video files unless you want to spend a lot of time shuttling videos to "backup" media, an experiment I will leave for another day. Thank you for reading my adventure. I wish you the same luck that I enjoyed.

Decent one offs, even if lacking a few things
I won't review BSG's Season 3 here as it others have done so more conclusively elsewhere. Instead, a few thoughts if you're thinking of buying an episode or two of Season Three off of Unbox:

1. Video quality is a lot better than the Sci-Fi channel broadcasts. It's roughly equivalent to the DVDs for the previous years, which are some of the better mastered sets out there. An example: in Exodus part 2, I noticed details never seen in the broadcasts - like the underside of the Galactica glowing red while she was getting attacked by the Cylon fleet. Very pretty on a standard definition TV; decent but not spectacular when upconverted to an HD-capable set.

2. Audio quality is a disappointing push. As best as I can tell this is actually 2 channel, which is a shame considering it was filmed in DD 5.1 and the DVDs also have a 5.1 soundtrack. Better than the broadcasts, but not by much.

3. All in all, if you don't want to buy the full DVD set (or waste money on the HD-DVD versions since they're now obsolete) not a bad choice.

Superior quality compared to iTunes
My analog cable TV reception isn't stellar. I've been watching Battlestar via an iTMS season pass since "Pegasus" in season 2; and the quality's really been been hit and miss- even after Apple doubled the resolution and started using H.264 late last year. Gray blacks, blocky motion, lots of compression artifacts and generally toned-down color. It was still better than watching on analog cable.. but not by a vast amount.

The Unbox episodes of Battlestar (via a Series2 TiVo) make the iTMS versions look like crappy analog cable. Almost twice the bitrate and twice the filesize, and the same price per episode. No grayed space scenes. No choppy motion- everything's nice and fluid. The quality's closer to DVD/MPEG-2. Six's dress is a vibrant red, not a muted compressed red. And the action loaded "Exodus Pt 2" simply looks amazing. I've compared both versions on a LCD HDTV- (iTunes over 1366x768 VGA vs TiVo over S-Video)there is no comparison, Unbox wins hands down. I hope Unbox plans to carry Season 4 of Battlestar and uploads promptly to the store the day after airing- something Apple failed to do frequently.

My only complaint is that standard-def TiVo users are stuck with 4:3 Letterbox instead of true 16:9 Widescreen. If a widescreen version was available- I'd upgrade to Series 3/TiVoHD in a heartbeat. But this is still the best quality D/L version of Battlestar that you can buy.