Short description:

Deluxe Pass is a mega-site holding hard-core, amateur fetish material. There is over 11,000,000MB of content with the network holding 750+ sites with daily updates.

Intro promises

- One of the largest adult sites on the internet
- Collection of over 1,300 DVDs
- Over 11,000,000MB of content in the network
- Unlimited downloads
- Free access to 4 DeluxePass paysites
- Daily updates
- Over 750 sites in the network.

First impression

Deluxe Pass has been a name in the DVD Archive category of adult sites for some time. The word most commonly associated with it is a simple "Big."

Going through the tour on the preview pages, I can see that this is most certainly an understatement. Over 11,000,000MB of content? That's insane. Absolutely insane. This site's hosting fees alone must be astronomical. The layout is soft and very easy on the eyes- very professional and unassuming. The only thing here that worries me is the 750+ sites they have listed. There are a lot of ways to organize 1,300 DVDs and if it's as random as it appears, we may be in for a navigational nightmare.

Our opinion
For those of you unfamiliar with the DVD Archive category of sites, I'll give you a brief rundown: Sites like Deluxe Pass work out agreements with major porn production companies to distribute their videos on the internet. They pay the production companies a fee for the use of a video, then put the video on their website for viewing or download, and the consumer pays for access. Some of the companies represented on this site include Puritan, Caballero, Jill Kelly Productions, Elegant Angel, and several others. These are not exclusive videos, they're just a stockpile of stuff you can buy at the store except you don't need to leave your house to buy them.

Now that you know what you're getting into, we'll move on to some details about this particular site. The main members' page maintains the professional layout and design with a brief toolbar at top (mainly for account-related links) and then a navigation section on the side that will take you to a number of different destinations: newest sites, last updated sites, biggest sites, top rated sites, etc. Below that are the categories. For a site so large I expected more than 11 broad categories (that include DVD Archives, Pornstars, Oral, Lesbians, etc.) and I fear that this is a harbinger of navigational doom. In the body of the page here you'll find network info and news (including the latest sites added to the network). Then you get a few thumbnails and a handful of random links to pages in each of the categories listed on the sidebar. This is a nice jumping-off point for a site that is pretty difficult to take all in at once.

Flipping through a few of the sites I can see a bit of the navigation problems I was worried about (more about that later), but each site's description comes with a content filesize total (in MBs) and those all appear to be accurate. You do have to re-enter your username and password for every site you open, so hopefully you picked something easy to type for the former and you're keeping the latter on the clipboard for pasting. Otherwise your hands will get tired for all the wrong reasons.

The movies, as stated on the tour, are all downloadable and are in .AVI format. The sources for these videos vary a great deal, which means the quality is dependent upon the quality of that source. Older videos (there are some from the '80s) have the early film-to-tape transfer quality to them while the newer digitally-produced stuff has the semi-professional video sheen to it. One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find, though, was that a great deal of the compression was done with the same codec (something called XVID) and at the same resolution (a nicely-sized 480x360). This equalizes the quality of the content to some extent. And it's a very good quality at that. There are some exceptions to these rules, but this is pretty much an average for the network's video quality. I had some trouble with the XVID decoder (some strange color mapping and digital artifacting coupled with sometimes-slow seek times) but for the most part this is a solid quality of video suitable for full-screen viewing with a touch of the DiVX-style grain to which most people have grown accustomed.

What is not as consistent is the manner in which the videos are presented on the sites. Most have a relatively standard setup consisting of a few thumbnails per scene and then a link to download the scene. However, some have only one thumb on the main page with a link to a seperate page all about that scene that includes more thumbs and the download link. Some others' main pages have one thumb per entire movie and each movie has its own page for more info on each scene or only the entire movie is downloadable in one giant file. And still others have the scenes sectioned out into smaller chunks (though these are rare). The lengths and filesizes of these videos varies as much as one might expect. The bottom line on that, though, is this: Don't expect to get anywhere on this site without a download manager. Clips range from 9MB to 900MB a piece and if you can't do a little downloading automatically while you're asleep, you will get sucked into the vortex of watching the status bar tick away until you can start another one manually. Find a simple, free manager and set it to work. Luckily, Deluxe Pass has some compassion for its users and allows download managing and somehow manages to keep the servers running at respectable speeds despite the terrabytes of info that must be passing through this site every second. Very impressive.

Basically, all I've had to say so far about the site is positive. Now we'll get a little bit into the navigation problems I have with the site. As mentioned before, the movies are all "organized" into very broad categories that include DVD Archive, Lesbian, Amateur, etc. My question here is whether or not the DVD Archive category includes redundancies from the other categories. What I mean is, aren't all of these videos DVD Archives? What puts a movie in this category instead of something content-specific. But the categories are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deciphering the relatively random placement of the videos on these hundreds of pages. For instance, could someone tell me what the difference between "Pls Screw My Wife" and "Pls Bang My Wife" is? Do they have definitions of "screw" and "bang" on hand and an intern to decide which video goes where? The whole "We have 1097596723608 sites in our network!" bit is getting a little old at this point. Sure, you have that many sites, but I found dozens of videos that appear two or three times within these different sites, so what's the point? The navigation system here is far too arbitrary to be efficient. And far too massive and redundant to fall into the "Looking is part of the fun" category. Unless you like wasting your time seeing links to videos you've already seen on other sites within this network. This all sounds very harsh, I know. If the site had less content, there would be less to complain about. But there are simply too many sites and too few ways to find what you're looking for. Not to mention there's no efficient way to look for updates- the "Newest Updates" link on the main page just lists sites that have been updated in the past 7 days. So if you've somehow forgotten which of the 1,300 DVDs were originally represented on a site that appears in that section, it'll be all guesswork as the sites mainly have a static framework that don't mention when a video was added.

There seems to be no effort to change this format. One of the newest sites on the network at the time of this writing is called XXX Kittens and contains all spanking videos. Why is it not called Spanked Kittens? I have no idea. More importantly, why is there not a way to simply view the entire DVD collection by title? Then you could go down, one by one, looking for titles that interested you and checking them off after you've flipped through the scenes from it. The only reason to disclude this option that I can think of is that they'd rather not make it quite so easy to find what you're looking for. This may sound malicious on their part but, in all honesty, there must be a point of diminishing returns for them in how easy they make it for someone to rip everything out of the site and bail. It's one good way to keep people on the line- I'd just rather see one a bit less frustrating.

There is also the question about whether these sites are refereed by Deluxe Pass for quality. For instance, another of the newest sites on the network includes photos taken with a "proffesional digital camera." But at least you're thanked for "purchesing" a membership. It would seem here then that Deluxe Pass is more interested in quantity than in quality. While I would say that that is not most often the case with the sites on the network, there is certainly (again) the argument to be made for consistency. I am a bit confused about how the network actually works- the vast majority of the sites appear to follow a similar template, but occasionally one pops up that looks like a legitimate seperate site and I can't help but wonder if these individual sites just jump aboard Deluxe Pass or if DP simply absorbs them. It's not important, I guess, but I am certainly curious.

Bonus content on the site includes memberships to some CandidCam sites that I've never been impressed with- certainly after seeing so much content on Deluxe Pass itself. But that includes such sites as VoyeurDorm and about 20 other small video archive sites.