VCA XXX (1)
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| Status: |
Current Member for less than 1 month (at the time of review).
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| Pros: |
- Part of the Hustler Mega Pass network
- Access to many ‘classics’
- Looks like it hadn’t updated in two years, but it may be updating now
- Several formats and downloading options
- Supports download managers
- No obvious time-out issues
- Excellent download speeds
- Site bills at $19.95
- Bills through Epoch |
| Cons: |
- Many scenes are unlabeled for performers
- Many scenes have the wrong thumbnails
- VCA must have a huge ‘classics’ catalogue, so why so few here?
- The curse of the modern porn site: streaming that launches automatically
- Some dead links
- Many titles are incomplete
- Search / sort functions don’t work well
- No pictures
- Many titles are ‘bargain bin’ compilations |
| Bottom Line: |
I’m a big fan of ‘classic’ videos. I realize that’s a term open to some interpretation but my preference for classic starts in the mid-1980s and goes through the mid to late 1990s. I’m always open to taking a membership on a site that offers me some titles to expand my collection. So with this in mind I signed up for the Hustler Mega Pass network through VCA XXX. I should note that while the website is definitely called VCA XXX, on the site itself the banner says VCA Classics. The DVDs on the site seem to fall within my preferences. There is little here if your preferences are earlier than the mid-1980s.
The site is relatively small, offering only 111 DVDs as of this writing. It appears that the site stopped updating in 2010 but may have started again recently since there was one update per month in the first three months of this year. There is no update for April.
The site is obviously a video site, so no pictures are offered that I could find.
The primary page is divided into two main segments: one for individual scenes (listed by performer) and one for DVDs. Clicking on the performer in the scene section obviously opens that scene for viewing or downloading. Clicking on a DVD cover open that DVD’s page where you get one thumbnail of the star per scene. Clicking on that thumbnail opens the scene page for viewing or downloading.
Streaming options are for MP4, FLV and WMV. You can also choose the quality of the stream as Basic, Medium, High or Super. Super is not often available.
When you roll over the download button the options for that scene appear in a dropdown menu. Downloads are most commonly available as WMVs but sometimes there are MP4s on offer too. This site has very little in high-resolution on offer. My suspicion is that because we’re dealing with ‘classics’ the quality of the originals is a limiting factor. For that reason, correct or not, I’m won’t hold the lack of HD availability against the site.
The more-recently added videos (I download WMVs) are at 720x540 at 1200kbps and 30fps. WMV Codec is 9. Videos uploaded a while ago (as far back as 2003) are lower resolution.
The site (and all the other in the network) commits a sin that seems to be more common now: opening the scene page starts the streaming automatically. This presents the obvious, though easily fixed problem of being surprised when your speakers suddenly blare out the sounds of sex. That’s solved by turning your speakers off. But in my opinion the problem is bigger than that: the fact that the scene starts downloading as a stream hogs bandwidth and slows the downloading process.
I used Free Download Manager successfully and had no issues with timeouts. Download speeds were excellent.
The site is not without flaws. It is clearly an add-on to the network and not intended as a flagship site. The updates are sporadic. My biggest beef with the site is the size of it. VCA has a huge catalogue of titles so why not offer more and update more often? What’s worse is that many of the titles added when the site was new are bargain bin European compilations that Hustler put out.
Other beefs are in how the DVDs are presented. Each DVD opens into a separate page that provides one thumbnail per scene and lists the star. Or that’s the plan anyway. At least 25% of the scenes don’t list a star. This doesn’t make sense since these are the guys who uploaded it. Why not make the site complete and make sure names are associated with every scene? In some cases, the thumbnails don’t even match the scene. I saw instances where, in a movie from the mid-1990s the thumbnails were clearly from a movie a decade newer. In several cases, the five or six thumbnails were even taken from the same newer scene. It just looks sloppy.
There were some dead links for the highest resolution available which meant having to download a lower resolution. This isn’t a huge issue as I may have encountered a dozen of these dead links on the site.
Many of the sort functions don’t work well. If you select to sort by “Pornstars,” for example, you’re given a list of pornstars on the entire network, not just on this site. What’s worse though, is that all you get is a brief bio – there are no links to scenes or photos on the site or network.
TBP notes that there is a full trial. I can’t speak to that as I took the full membership but I wasn’t charged the $30 price listed there. I don’t know why, but I was only billed $20. I don’t know if that was a special offer or whether that’s the price now.
If this were a stand-alone site I couldn’t recommended it. It is too small, updates infrequently and has a lot of low grade material mixed in. I hoped for a better classics site from a company with Hustler’s resources. As a secondary site to the network it makes a decent addition but I do wish someone would create a better site than this. These older titles deserve better. |
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