Walt Zwirko / WFAA-TV

Vudu's main screen highlights featured movies.

Couch potatoes, rejoice! There's finally a gizmo that brings the movie rental store right to your media room.

Vudu isn't a cable or a satellite box; it's not a DVD player or a VCR (although it does play movies).

Vudu helps establish a brand new category in home entertainment, because all of its content comes directly from the Internet.

It's a compact box, about 9 inches wide, 7 inches deep and 2 1/2 inches tall. The back panel has a full complement of connectors for your big screen TV—composite, component and HDMI digital.

But there's another connection that most home theater components don't have: An ethernet jack to make a connection with your high speed Internet service. If the link to the Web is fast enough, Vudu can deliver movies to your box in real time.

That means as soon as you want to watch one of the 5,000 films in Vudu's online library, you can.

My Internet link at home, provided by the local cable TV service, wasn't always fast enough for instant Vudu movie enjoyment; in most cases, the movie was downloaded for viewing within an hour.

Finding a film to enjoy is super-easy, thanks to Vudu's user-friendly interface and its disarmingly simple 5-button remote, which fits nicely in the hand and is almost microscopic when compared with the typical remote control.

The remote has a scroll wheel, similar to the one on on a computer mouse. Roll your thumb over the wheel to highlight a menu item, then push down on the wheel to select it.

The wheel also acts as the forward and reverse control when you're watching a movie; the faster you scroll the wheel, the faster you'll fly through the scenes (guided by a time bar at the bottom of the screen).

Walt Zwirko / WFAA-TV

Vudu's simple five-button remote is all you need to call up its online library.

A press of the Vudu key returns you to the main menu.

In addition to browsing through pre-selected categories, you can also use the Vudu search engine to find a movie by title, actor, or director. Vudu also lets you search by genre, most popular, and there's even a category for Vudu staff favorites.

All the films on the service have brief descriptions, and many are offered with a trailer (which plays in a window, not full screen). As you go through the lists, you have several choices:

• Rent it (from 99 cents to $3.99)
• Buy it (certain titles, priced from $4.99 to $19.99)
• Add it to your Wish List
• View similar movies

With 5,000 films to consider (and more being added daily), the selection process might the be most entertaining part of Vudu. It reminded me of the days when you could go into a record store and flip through album covers (although here, of course, you have some added visual elements).

You won't necessarily find your favorite films or artists on Vudu. I checked to see if there were any Mel Brooks movies; there weren't (although there are seven Mel Gibson movies for your entertainment).

The picture quality is generally excellent. You won't mistake these Internet-delivered movies for YouTube clips; they were near-DVD quality when viewed on a 37-inch LCD set.

While Vudu is engineered to deliver high definition content, there are no HD films currently on offer. "As soon as we receive high definition titles from our studio partners, we will be ready to deliver them to our customers," the company says on its Web site. No word on whether you'll have to pay a premium to view them, or whether HD titles be available for instantaneous playback.

So the question is: Would you pay $400 for what amounts to Blockbuster in a box?

Unlike the Internet or regular television, Vudu has no free content (other than movie trailers and information snippets). I found it particularly frustrating to have such a capable piece of equipment physically connected to the World Wide Web—but constricted to the Vudu universe.

Why can't you also use Vudu's nifty remote to browse Web sites with more information about a certain film?

Why can't you use this hardware to access free Web video in addition to movies?

These are things that could be remedied with a software upgrade, and I think its something that could move Vudu from a clever niche product to the do-it-all device we desperately need to feed our flat screens with non-stop entertainment.

The Vudu remote does have a currently-unused button labeled "More." Perhaps added functions are already in the works!

Watch Computer Corner every week on News 8 Midday at noon, or online any time.

E-mail askwalt@wfaa.com