Im a bit of a visual guy, I notice when the quality in a stream is pretty bad. I often get a freebie to rent a movie and am starting to notice that the SD quality is not that noticeably different from the HD streams. There are some movies Id rather rent on bluray at a redbox just because the quality isnt top notch. What service do you guys think has the best quality stream?
I use Vudu and it is a good service (but slow customer service if problems occur).
I prefer it because it is on all services (Android, Apple, Windows, so you are not locked into a brand), allows you to download your bought movies onto a computer, allows you to buy from other Ultraviolet stores, owned by Walmart, and allows you to digitally share movies.
Google Play Movies is great. So many deals and freebies.
Vudu would be the best for streaming.
Or you can pirate the blu-ray rip. And to ease your consciences, you can pay for the rental alongside it.
I know what you mean though. I'm tired of all these poorly encoded 4Mbps "HD" streams.
This doesn't help you at all, but iTunes honestly has pretty good HD rental quality. Their bitrate isn't that much larger than other services, but somehow they're doing better quality encodes. Unfortunately, this is pointless if you want to watch on Android TV.
I'm going to chime in for Vudu as having the best video and audio quality for streaming movies. I was actually surprised how good it looks. I've used Google Play Movies (GPM) before too for several rentals due to cheap or free deals, but GPM was noticeably worse every time. GPM wasn't as sharp, had color banding, and had blocking/artifacts/noise in dark or busy scenes. My guess is the encodes aren't top notch. That's why iTunes is considered the best. They do their own encoding of every movie.
*For reference, my movie watching is 90% with Blu-ray rips on my Plex server and then streamed (not transcoded or compressed) to my Shield TV with Plex. My home theater gear is a Panasonic 1080p projector and 106" Da-Lite grey screen. For me, it's pretty easy to tell if a streaming service video quality is not great when comparing to a straight uncompressed Blu-ray rip or when played via disc from a Blu-ray player.
My PLEX server! :)
Other than that Vudu.
Vudu is great. I also think Google Play Movies is very good. Those are my favorite high quality sources. Vudu includes Atmos with 4k too which is nice.