This is the second installment for my series on video rental options that work with Xbox 360 (or set top boxes in general). Vongo recently announced support for the Xbox 360, and with a 14-day free trial I thought I ‘d try it out.

Vongo is a download video service owned by Starz Entertainment that can best be described as a video subscription service similar to Netflix meets CinemaNow. For $9.99/month you get all the movies you can download from their current selection of movies. While the selection of movies (2,500 titles) isn’t as large as Amazon’s Unbox, there are more current mainstream movies (The Queen, Stranger than Fiction, Bridge to Terabithia, etc) than can be found on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” service.

As with most of the services available, you have to download a special application to find and download the Windows Media DRM’d movies. The movies are in standard DVD resolution (720×480) but are compressed down to about 1GB. Picture quality was generally lower than a DVD, but higher than what I have experienced with the on-demand movies available from my cable company. I should note that there was a noticeable jitter on scenes that pan side to side a lot. With my eye for compression artifacts, I usually notice things like that, but even my wife noticed and complained about it. Overall I would say the picture quality was acceptable, but still lower than the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Vongo’s application can run as a standalone application, or within Windows Media Center. After trying both interfaces, I strongly prefer the normal GUI and not the Media Center version. The only saving grace about the Media Center interface is that it mostly works on Media Center Extenders such as the Xbox 360. The programs will queue up your movies and download them one at a time, and even though I have a 10MBit/sec internet connection most downloads were around 1.5MBit/sec and took about an hour. If you plan on watching the movie on your computer, you can start playing it after just a minute. You have to wait until the download completes to watch it on another device like the Xbox 360 though.

Up to this point everything sounds good, but unfortunately it wasn’t that easy. The download manager seemed to crash quite often. It could only download 2-3 movies before it would crash. You have no idea how annoying it is to be half-way into a movie only to have it stop all of the sudden.

I also encountered quite a few odd problems with it not taking care of the DRM properly. In fact, I had to use a trick I learned getting CinemaNow to work on Vongo too. One movie even stopped playing half-way through because it lost its authorization to play mid-movie. Go figure.

Last but not least, you can’t actually play movies on an Xbox 360 through the Media Center interface. If you try to, it will just basically crash the Media Center interface. You can only do it through the normal video playblack that is built-in to the 360. It is nice that you don’t have to have Media Center to play the videos however.

Even with all of the technical snafus, I still kind of liked the service. I am planning on canceling after my free trial runs out, but I might try it again later (unlike CinemaNow). The problem for Vongo is that the software is just too buggy. The average user is not going to be able to get it to work, and others who maybe could get it to work won’t want to deal with the hassle. If you are curious about it, I would recommend trying out the 14-day free trial they have going on right now. You have nothing to lose but possibly some of your time.

For another movie rental option, see our coverage on using Amazon Unbox and Tivo together.