Joost 1.0 beta: new features, open for everyone

Joost LogoThe video service Joost has finally reached 1.0 beta. As one of the people who were in on the Joost for Friends alpha testing, I decided to download the latest client to see what was new in the latest version. So far my experience has been that the new 1.0 beta isn’t as stable as the 0.19 alpha I used to have installed.

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Filed In: TV & Online Video, Tech Reviews, Web 2.0
October 11, 2007

Sony DVD Player + Sony Movies = Won’t Play

DVD PlayerRecently when I was browsing some movies on Netflix, one of the movies I was rating had at warning that said “NOTICE: This DVD is not compatible with some DVD players. See details.” The details revealed that “Certain movies released by Sony Pictures (listed below) were encoded with a version of the ARccOS copy-protection software that made the DVDs incompatible with certain DVD players.” Sony has been employing a form of DVD mangling copy-protection call ARccOS on films released by Sony Pictures for some time now. It is one of the reasons many of their DVDs will not play on computers and apparently certain DVD players. Here is the list via Netflix of DVD players that can’t play Sony/ARccoS DVDs (emphasis added):

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Filed In: TV & Online Video, Tech Stories
September 26, 2007

Review: Using Vongo with the Xbox 360

VongoThis 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.

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Filed In: Just For Fun, Microsoft and Google, TV & Online Video, Tech Reviews
September 24, 2007

Review: CinemaNow on Xbox 360

After the announcement by CinemaNow that users could now watch leased bought/rented videos on their Xbox 360s I figured I would give it a shot. I am a Netflix user, but I have watched a few movies via the Xbox Live Marketplace (XLM) recently as well. I really like both services, and thought that CinemaNow’s larger library might be a good substitute for the XLM. I didn’t intend to do a write-up on this, but after my experience I thought it could be something that others could benefit from. I will be approaching this in two parts: first, the quality of the CinemaNow service regardless of the playback device; and second, the process to bring it to the TV.

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Filed In: Gadgets, Gaming, TV & Online Video, Tech Stories
July 30, 2007

Leisure: Don’t tell me how to waste my time!

Sheep Looking at a TelevisionSo after my Wii post from yesterday, I wanted to clear something up. This post really has nothing to do with the Wii, but the response to a statement I made about the Wii got me started on this train of thought.

In the post, I said that Nintendo is doing very well with what I call their strategy of selling “checkers instead of chess”. Although it was not intended to be insulting, apparently it came off that way. For me, I don’t care if you enjoy checkers or chess, there’s no qualitative difference, they are both just games. Some people like to read books for leisure, while I don’t usually find anything about reading books to be leisurely. People have different tastes. It is great that Nintendo wants to push to create games for people who don’t want to literally invest time in a game.

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Filed In: Gaming, Just For Fun, TV & Online Video
July 18, 2007

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© 2009 J. Paul Ellis