SANTA MONICA, California (March 11, 2010) – MOVIECLIPS.com, home of the largest and most diverse collection of free, licensed movie scenes anywhere on the web, today launched a new media player, the Movieclips Player, custom-built by pirate developer Paul Yanez. The Movieclips Player is game-changing for film lovers, delivering clips in their original aspect ratio, and making it super-easy for users to find, edit, and share their favorite movie scenes. The announcement was made by MOVIECLIPS.com co-founders, Zach James and Rich Raddon.
Yanez gained Internet notoriety last year when he created a rogue, open source media player that streamed Hulu content, ads and all, while Hulu was still in beta. He did this in his spare time. And he released it for free.
“We wanted the ultimate movie clip player and we thought of Paul, he is the best,” said James, “ We were familiar with Paul’s controversy with Hulu when they shut down the stream, and we watched a very public cat-and-mouse game that in the end, nobody won — especially not movie lovers.”

The Movieclips Player’s four unique features:
• Size matters: The Movieclips Player is one of the first embeddable players to respect the original aspect ratio of every feature film
• Gives bloggers and Facebook users the tools to “trim-and-share” clips down to just their favorite movie quotes: “You talkin’ to me?”
• Editing and sharing happens within the Movieclips Player environment – the toolbar just slides up to reveal more tools
• Full movie dialogue search engine built into every player
“Only people who care about films as much as we do would go to this length to ensure a great viewing experience.” said Raddon, former Director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. “We had the chance to set a new standard, and to actually rethink how to connect with movies online. We made it easy to watch a clip from Inglourious Basterds or Elf, edit the clip down to your favorite quote, and share it on Facebook or a blog, etc.
You can also learn more about the film or see related clips, search full dialogue or buy the DVD – we built that into a single, elegant player, so everything is only a click away.”
“In the end, it’s just a player,” added James. “But how we approached this player – who we hired to build it and why we incorporated these features – says something important about how we view the world and why we started this company. By giving movie fans the tools to watch and share their favorite scenes easily, the studios suddenly have allies recommending their products. Every time a movie fan shares a clip from The Big Lebowski or This Is Spinal Tap on Facebook or on their blog, it’s a reminder to their friends of each movie’s value in our lives.”
MOVIECLIPS.com took its service worldwide in late February and opened up access to its API for approved developers, giving this community the opportunity to innovate using MOVIECLIPS.com’s library of more than 12,000 clips, each tagged with rich metadata, Find and share clips from your favorite films, and get details about becoming an approved MOVIECLIPS.com developer, at movieclips.com.

About MOVIECLIPS.com
Launched in December 2009, MOVIECLIPS.com is a premium online video destination offering audiences the largest and most diverse collection of movie scenes. MOVIECLIPS.com allows fans to find, watch and share more than 12,000 movie clips from the libraries of most major Hollywood studios. Each clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data (dialogue, actor, director, action, mood, etc) to make the most searchable collection of movie scenes on the web. Go to movieclips.com for more information.

Jobs recently held a town hall meeting at Apple and said that Adobe is lazy and that the new iPad doesn’t have Flash because “whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it’s because of Flash”. “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

So in few sentences Steve basically calls Adobe incapable of producing quality software, irrelevant and calls them lazy which is perhaps the worst thing an engineer could be called. Just think of what the mood at engineering department at Adobe headquarters is like right now. Do you honestly believe that they will get any quailty people applying now?

Can Adobe get a CEO with balls who can actually do something when stuff like this happens? I had to look it up on Google, the president and chief executive officer of Adobe is Shantanu Narayen. Good job Shantanu .

Seems like Shantanu needs a few ideas so here goes.
Shantanu, could Adobe not release CS5 for the Mac and see how relevant Adobe is to the purchases of Mac’s and see if Steve changes his tune. The main reason people buy a Mac is to be creative and the programs most creatives use is Adobe. Am I missing something here, can Adobe at least delay releases to the Mac. Honestly if Steve Jobs said anything like this about Microsoft when Bill Gates was in charge, tell me Bill wouldn’t have unleashed hell on Apple. But Adobe just takes it and will soon be so insignificant no one will will even bother to insult them.

Shantanu, how about calling out Apple on Objective C and how horrible it is to develop in it. And that the main reason of not letting Flash on the iPad is to not unleash millions of Flash developers onto their platform.

Shantanu, how about going on the offensive and saying how Youtube and all web video would not exist unless it was for Flash. How about questioning Apple on why Flash works fine on Android, why doesn’t it work on the iPhone? Shantanu say anything, do anything, but being silent and taking the high road is not the right play.

cnet arrticle

The manner in which Microsoft released the beta of Silverlight 4 at the Professional Developer Conference on Nov 18th shows me one thing, Microsoft is not only very serious about being the leader in the RIA arena but they are looking to crush the competition, namely Adobe Flash.

First, the speed in which this beta was announced, just 3 months after the release of Silverlight 3. The release of Silverlight 3 was huge, but this beta just completely blows it away. The demos presented at the PDC conference by Scott Guthrie were simply great and just sent the developers into a frenzy.

Secondly, the new features in Silverlight 4 are simply unbelievable. The new features include:
Webcam and microphone support
Printing
Library sharing with WPF
Rich Text
Clipboard access
Right click support
Mouse wheel
Drag and Drop from desktop
MVVM
WCF RIA Services
New Windowing API’s
Notification pop-up support
HTML support
Keyboard in Fullscreen mode
Hardware device access

The planned release of Silverlight 4 is in the first half of 2010.

I love how folks are not agreeing with me on the end of Adobe Flash and sending me emails, the bottom line is that I see this as the modern day “Browser wars” when Microsoft went all out against Netscape and crushed them. I see Microsoft doing the same in the RIA space and Microsoft is going all out to win. Microsoft doing a release like this in 3 months, I ask myself how many resources were ported over from other products to this release?

Developers can start building apps but the player is not pubicly available
Silverlight 4 Beta Information – Get all your downloads here
Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features
Silverlight 4 runtime

The first is that Adobe cut 9% percent of its workforce on Nov 10th, this is the second huge cut by Adobe in the past year. In my opinion, Adobe is a Desktop publishing company and not a software devleopment company and when/if further cuts occur, they will happen on the Flash teams, not the Photoshop teams.

The second big thing to occur is the yesterday’s article by Techcrunch on was the announcement of a ‘Seesmic for Windows’ client. The entire article seems like a huge jab/left hook at Adobe Air and it’s limitations and all the new capabilities Seesmic will have because of the switch to the Windows platform.

What you will see as a result of Seesmic moving to Windows is a constant reminder of the Windows platform due to the nature in which Loic delivers releases, which seems to be almost weekly.

In my original article I basically stated that you could do the same exact things in Silverlight that you could do in Flash. I was hesistant to state that Silverlight was more powerful because I wanted to reach the flash community in a calm rational approach.

Seesmic coming out like this will be the first in many to come on the limitations the Flash/Adobe Air platform as compared to the Microsoft platform.

Two weeks ago I believed it would be 2 years before all the real applications/games on the web would be in Silverlight and Flash would be used for nothing more than creating banners. I think it will be sooner than that now.

The Debate
You may have seen numerous articles on the Flash vs Silverlight debate such as this one. I believe that the articles being written and discussions that are taking place are simply asking the wrong questions.

The discussions should not be between the specific details of Flash and Silverlight. But it should be at a higher level, such as “How long will it take me to become a professional in Silverlight?”, by professional, I mean someone is compensated for their work. Just think of the possibilities that are opened up by learning this product, you basically open yourself up to a whole new industry.

Learning Curve
So if I am right, the million dollar question is – How long is it going to take to learn this new software product?
In my honest opinion if you are a Flash developer as soon as you start the program you will know about 60% of it right out of the box. Simply due to the similarities between Flash and Blend, practically the same tools, timeline, stage, properties, layout code etc. The following videos I have made are about 30 minutes in total length and will get you up to about 80%. Think about that, 80% knowledge of a new product and you have invested less than an hour.

Animation
Introduction to Animation in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Integration with Adobe
Importing graphics from Adobe Illustrator into Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Customizing Cursors
Implementing a custom hit area in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Drawing
Exploring the Gradient tool in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Layout
Exploring the Canvas control in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Video
Creating a Silverlight video player in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Layers
Exploring the Objects panel in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Creating Buttons
Creating a Silverlight button with Microsoft Blend 3

Styles
Creating a Resource Dictionary with Microsoft Blend 3

Hit Area
Implementing a custom hit area in Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Money
When all is said and done, it comes down to money. If a developer is as knowledgeable in Flash and SilverLight, the Silverlight developer will be compensated more, PERIOD. The flash job opportunities mostly come by way of the Advertising field and game development worlds and the projects built are measured in days.

The Silverlight opportunities will come by way of Engineering based companies. Engineering companies mostly work on projects that are measured in years.

The Bottom Line…
For the last 10 plus years when asked what I do, I would proudly say “I am a flash developer that ….
Moving forward my answer will be “I create user experiences and I use products a,b,c.

Try Silverlight for 60 days for free. I feel like it’s 1998 all over again and can’t believe more people aren’t aware of this movement. I am going to do everything I can to push Silverlight in front of everyone whether they are developers, users or clients.

Either way we will be the winners from this, us the developers. Microsoft and Adobe will be forced to improve.

Created in 2008, some videos may not play

I call this the “I want” style of development…
I want to extend my framework into the desktop by means of Adobe Air.
I want all the full length tv shows and movies from hulu.com in my application.
I want to be able to resize the application so only the video plays and I can dock to the side of my monitor.
I want to be able to browse the hulu library while I am watching a video.

I want the application to scale to a 30 inch monitor.
I want the application to support the new search functionality, which will enable all videos/clips from hulu.com to be viewable in the application.
I thought if I could get this done it would be pretty cool.

I want to be able to resize the application so only the video plays and I can dock the application to the side of my monitor.

Here you can see the Hulu application docked to the top left of the monitor, which allows a user to continue to work on the remainder of the monitor. There are no controls to get this video only state, once the user shrinks the window below a certain size the content disappears and only the video is shown.

I want the application to scale to a 30 inch monitor.

Hulu.com is built for a fixed size and does not scale, for a website I guess this is ok, but for an application the view would need to expand to the full width and height. This one feature would allow a user to view close to 150 videos at a glance instead of endlessly scrolling.

I want to be able to browse the hulu library while I am watching a video.

I built a mini video on the bottom left of the app, so the video continues to play while you search for other shows/movies to watch. Clicking and searching does not stop the video you are watching. I also added the ability to sort by Genre which is helpful in filtering videos and is consistent with Hulu.com.

I want all the full length TV shows and Movies from Hulu.com in my application.

Hulu.com has full length TV shows/Movies but they also have clips. The Hulu community and myself have not embraced clips, so I have chosen to not include them. To me, a two minute spot of a movie preset by a 30-45 second ad is not entertaining. I am open to this, if the response I get is in favor of having them, then fine. This application currently has 240 TV shows which have multiple episodes and 92 full length movies.

I want the application to support the new search functionality, which will enable all videos/clips to be viewable in the application.

Just type in your search anywhere on the app and it will return results from hulu.com. This feature basically allows users to have full access to the Hulu.com video content.

Here is the “My Designed” version of Hulu.

The Hulu community is very positive on the interface design of hulu.com, and I wanted to stay true to the Hulu brand. The only issue I have is that design does not translate well into other mediums such as television. So I am posting this screen that is remote enabled and developed for television, I did not integrate into the app, I will await response from the community.

Here is the “My Designed” version of Hulu2.

To me , the AppleTV interface would be crazy for the Hulu interface, again will wait from the response from the community.

I want to extend my framework into the desktop by means of Adobe Air..

Last July, Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee posted an article “What if Joost were a Web App?” on my web version of Joost. At the time it seemed obvious to me that a client application would never compete against a web based app. So one could question why I would develop a client app after I criticized Joost in it’s development of a client app. The answer is simple, Joost was placing their entire business on a client app, my gaining a desktop client app presence was as simple as thinking of it and extending my framework. My framework written up by Josh Catone in the last year has moved beyond the web, and now supports multiple Operating Systems, Gaming systems and by default is built for Televison, which I think is the future.

Player in built in Adobe Flex

Hulu is is a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. Providence Equity Partners has also made a USD$100 million equity investment and holds a 10% stake in the company. The partnership was announced in March 2007 and the name “Hulu” was chosen in late August, when the website went live. The service offers full-length episodes of NBC and FOX television programs, including shows from the Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen channels.

Hulu has been getting lots of press as of late. Most of it is due to the fact that Hulu is in a closed beta and not accessible to the masses and nobody outside of the United States. Currently there are several solutions to the problem, Openhulu has made a website featuring all of Hulu’s content by embeddeding each player on it’s site. TVParadise figured out the workaround to the non American issue, and Veoh has recently become a hyper-aggregator showcasing Hulu content. Hulu videos are being distributed through a partner network that includes AOL, MySpace, Comcast, MSN and Yahoo.

Hulu Player The Hulu video player is really well designed in that it is very understated and allows the video to take center stage. The controls are semi transparent and fade away when a user no longer has their mouse on the video. The main flaw I believe with the Hulu player is that the videos are played in a traditional html manner, meaning a user needs to load a new page to look at the catalog of videos or to view a new video. My approach is a more traditional television guide approach, so a user never has to stop playing the video they are watching to browse for more videos to watch.

Hulu Media Player Hulu CTO Eric Feng has said “The company is considering making a self-service model for its player so that a fan site for the Office, for example, could embed the entire library of the show. “ I completely agree with Eric, a video player that is capable of multi video plays is necessary for Hulu because the main complaint against embedding individual videos is that it causes the page to have endless scrolling. I believe Hulu needs to have an embeddable player unlike that of a Youtube, mainly because players like that are meant for webpage viewing of short length videos and are not scalable to contain large volumes of videos.The only possible way for players like that to scale is to place it in a site that scales. My approach not only lets you have a “Prison Break” multi video channel player, but a multi show player that contains x number of videos all while having a TV like experience. Integrating Hulu videos into my media player was technically a few lines of code. The difficult part was figuring out how to integrate my media player with the Hulu player and not affect their brand. The answer I came up with was to a add one semi transparent buttton similar to their design to the top part of the menu bar. Whether this button lives within the x- y coordinates of the application as it does now or as html code as links below the player as Slide applications do, is technically the same.

Hulu Videos Navigation is meant to be simple and easy to use and also be similar to most multimedia devices on the market today. When the user clicks the “Show Guide” button the user is presented a main menu – currently it is a listing of the shows on Hulu. If a user clicks on a show such as “30 Rock” they would then be presented a new menu that contains a listing of “30 Rock’s” episodes. Hulu videos are full length and of high quality and include shows such as Prison Break, The Office, 24, Heroes, House, Battlestar Gallactica, My Name is Earl, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, Bones, Journeyman and Project Runway and many many others. My menu system easily allows you navigate back and forth between the show list and the drilled in episode list. Every menu item whether it be a show or an episode has a representative thumbnail. To improve quality I am using the high quality version of Hulu’s images.

Mini video My solution to being able to navigate the menu system and view videos is done by simply resizing the Hulu player and placing it in the lower part of the screen all while the video continues to play. If a user wants to play the video fullscreen again they can either click on the video or hit the “Close Guide” button to return.

Hulu and Menu

See thru One approach I thought of to have the ability to navigate and view the video would be to keep the video in it’s full size and simply overlay my mediaplayer over it. The varying scenes of the video with the menu made it have a very three dimensional feel and look more like a video game. I really liked this approach but it is very non-standard, so I went with the more traditional approach. Awaiting feedback from select folks and perphaps may go into a settings menu. Note: Currently not in the build, waiting on feedback.

Commercials The Hulu player starts all videos with an introductory 5 second animation. It is very nicely done and does not interfere with the user experience. With Hulu’s desire of embedding videos as a major part of the plan, I believe this is a clever and necessary move to keep emphasizing their brand. Note: The Hulu player has not been modified in my media player and all “commercials” play as expected.

Ads I am not too big a fan of this ad style, simply a static graphic with audio repeating the text in the graphic. The player does provide how many seconds remain for the ad to complete on the top header, so from a usability perspective this is well done. Note: The Hulu player has not been modified in my media player and all “Hulu graphics with Audio ads” play as expected.

Ads The Hulu player provides full video commercials making their player truly seem like a television experience. I believe they can get away with ads such as these because they are presenting full length high quality shows. Note: The Hulu player has not been modified in my media player and all “Hulu video ads” play as expected.

What Now As far as legality, Hulu has stated “we encourage the viral distribution of Hulu content in accordance with our terms of use.” The terms of use for hulu.com include at least two possible issues: the embeds are supposed to be for personal, non-commercial use and the content is supposed to remain in Hulu’s player. My media player conforms with their terms of use. The community has been asking me for an embeddable player, let’s see how this player is received. I know I will be asked if this player could be combined with the feeds from my other players (shown above) which has content from the top web sharing sites such as Youtube, Google Video etc. Technically it would be no problem. Could this be made into a facebook app. Yes. I am more concerned in building out a framework that has access to all web video content and be accessible not only on the web, but on television.

]]> http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/hulu-media-player/feed/ 3 http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/joost-beta-1-0/ http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/joost-beta-1-0/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:08:14 +0000 admin http://paulyanez.com/interactive/?p=46 View Player

Created in 2007, some videos may not play

Joost Beta 1.0
Two months ago I published my first Joost Flash Mashup and
since then went on to create applications for AppleTV, Flickr, Babelgum,and the Nintendo Wii (out already-publish next week). I haven’t seen Joost in 2 months, then I read how Beta 1.0 just came out and decided to download it. These screens are the changes made on top of the original. Also 99% of all the graphics have been drawn custom in vector in anticipation of having these applications truly run in a TV.

New Design The major change to Joost Beta 1.0 is the redesign. The main screen still has the same components but these components have been given a new polished look, and shows Joost commitment to developing a great product.

Content vs Users Joost has added alot of content in the last several weeks. In the last several weeks I have been really looking into Youtube and what makes it tick. The real engine behind YouTube is it’s users.The user’s do amazing video work and are marketing gurus, for instance user LisaNova has 72,748 subscribers and just did a video mashup with Perez Hilton. I would rather watch LisaNova than another video I already saw on MTV, just check out “Affirmation Girl…The Date from Hell” and try not to laugh out loud. Also there is no way any content acquistions per month could possibly keep up with the amount of new content YouTube gets every hour.

Dynamic Application Moving forward all my applications will have the ability to easily tap into user accounts on most web services. The first is YouTube, if you are a YouTube author and have uploaded videos than you simply enter “?author=username” or if you have never uploaded videos but have a favorites list, then you would enter “?favorite=username” or possibly you don’t have a YouTube account, you can still do a random search “?search=search term”. This simple feature allows users to view the application with their own videos,and not be tied into a closed system.

User Integration Not only can you enter in the info into the address bar, but user integration is built into the application. The users are growing at an alarming rate as the system is self learning and grows as it is being used. The feedback from the community as far as feature recommnedations, embeddable player requests has been awesome.

Fullscreen Support Joost has the ability to go fullscreen even on 30 inch monitors, the Flash version supports the same capability.

Widget Support Joost made a major change to their widget windows, scaling them down and only making them normal size when you actually use them. I suppose this comes in anticipation of developers creating new widgets and users having too many on the stage at one time. I do not agree with this and the Flash widgets are always their normal size.

Right Click Support Several weeks ago Joost did not support right click functionality, the Flash version has several more options and has supported this functionality for several months..

New Explore Menu After the new design I believe the next major overhaul is the “explore” menu. This is so far superior to the previous menu system and is definitely a step in the right direction, as content grows the scalability of it will be tested. The flash version supports this functionality and has eliminated the old style menu.

Drag and Drop Support Joost now supports the ability to drag and drop videos into a container which can be made into a custom channel. I am very interested to see if most users will get it and actually use this really cool feature. The flash version supports this feature.

Zoom Capability The explore menu allows users the ability to zoom in and out the thumbnails. The flash version also has this functionality but does it in realtime without having to reload the thumbs everytime the slider is dragged.

Old Design Joost Beta 1.0 still has the old design in several major parts of the application, the new design is far superior, so seeing two distinct styles in the same application is odd. The flash version has removed the old menu system entirely.

]]> http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/joost-beta-1-0/feed/ 1 http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/flickr-video/ http://paulyanez.com/interactive/index.php/2009/08/flickr-video/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:49:07 +0000 admin http://paulyanez.com/interactive/?p=43 View Player

Created in 2007, some videos may not play

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. Flickr has a repository that is quickly approaching 1 billion images (as of August 2007).

Here is a common user case scenario:

Flickr user goes on vacation, comes home, has hundreds of beautiful pictures on his camera, he uploads those images to his Flickr account. User also has video from the trip, Flickr doesn’t support video, user needs to go to another service. This is the problem with most Web 2.0, all services do a very good job at a task but no one provides an end to end solution for users.

Talk of Flickr having video support has been in the air for quite some time, the latest was Michael Arrington’s article on Flickr video.

Images for Flickr screens 2,3,5 are from Manganite.

Fullscreen Support The flickr version does not allow users to resize the window, if you try, good luck, it doesn’t work. My version allows user to not only resize, but go fullscreen. This screenshot is on my 30 inch monitor. I really like the layout of the components at this size.

Created in 2007, some videos may not play

Not AppleTV is a web based application that allows users to have the same experience as they would when purchasing an AppleTV device. A few enhancements have been added, features such as a “History” and a “Favories” list have been implemented.

AppleTV cannot be viewed in a browser, it must be purchased. Therefore I believe makes it even less accessible than downloadable clients such as Joost and Babelgum. I believe Apple with it’s resources should provide the mass audience with at least a minimal interatcive experience of their application, which will be a better experience than showing a Quicktime movie. I want to point out that I am not seeing this is as replacement, but I believe web applications will extend and enhance the experience to users, I can almost guarantee most users will not have access to their Apple TV at work.

The flash based version does not need to be downloaded for continuous updates, it works in all browsers on all operating systems. All enhancements and upgrades are transparent to the user and the application continues to retain the user preferences since the application is hosted on a server.

The next step is to extend the application from simply being a video player to a multimedia player and add images from Flickr or the user’s local machine, add RSS feeds from the top blogs, a social text and webcam chat component, and finally to add Music from radio stations or the user’s local iTunes/Windows Media Player directories.

I have also developed mashups for Joost and Babelgum.

Video List Users can either use their mouse or remote control to navigate thru the various lists of videos. Most sites and categories will have hundreds of new videos added daily.

Fullscreen Video The fullscreen portion of the application has the video playing with the iTunes controls on the bottom. A added featue is the details of the video appearing on load of a new video. Users also have the ability on this screen to add the video to a “favorites” list.

Interchangeable controllers Users have the ability to change controllers if they desire. This controller is based on the iTunes look and feel and allows the user to freely move the device on the screen and dock anywhere they please.

Categories of Videos The application has the following ” Categories” list – Classic TV, Documentaries, Ha Ha, Muisc HipHop, Muisc Hindi, Music Hits, Muisc Indie, Network TV, News, OMG Cute, Politics, Science & Nature, Sports Extreme, Talk & Chatter, Technology, Toons, Video Blogs, and Web Shows.

History of Videos A feature not included with AppleTV is the ability to track and save the viewed videos, thereby creating a History list. This is transparent to the user and allows the ability to find a video quickly in without going thru thousands of videos. The user has the option to have continuous play of videos while navigating thru the apllication, which is shown here at the bottom left. Or they can switch the option to be off.

Favorite Videos Users can with one click save videos to a favorites list which is maintained through different browser sessions.

Settings Control Panel The application has the ability to change settings in real-time. Features such as changing background colors, hiding and showing video details, changing alignment of the application from left to right, switching video from color to black and white, having a continuous play of the video or not, switching controls in the fullscreen mode from docked to undocked.

Change UI Layout Users have the ability to change the layout on the fly. If you are more accustomed to reading left to right, no problem. With one click users can modify the layout, this screen shows a setting of UI Alignment “LEFT”.

Show Video Details By default the flash application does not show video details below the image, however users who choose to have it, can. The three items if available are title, description and length.

Created in 2007, some videos may not play

Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis have been talking about the idea behind Joost for a long time. In early 2006, they started gathering the world’s best engineers, web gurus and media visionaries to start building it, under the code name of The Venice Project. More than a year of very hard work later, their vision is ready for public viewing.

In that time, Joost has grown from a handful of people in a small office outside Amsterdam to more than 100 people spread right across Europe and North America. Joost is already a global venture, bringing TV to a global, highly networked community. And already, it’s setting new standards for 21st-century entertainment.

Co- founder – Janus Friis http://youtube.com/watch?v=tpiUDppHi7I
Co-founder – Niklas Zennstrom http://youtube.com/watch?v=tlh7_-yErJQ
Head of Engineering – Sander Striker http://youtube.com/watch?v=KaXdb-3ShjQ
Head of Technology – Dirk http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tf2CcIjygC4
Executive Vice President – Henrik Werdelin http://youtube.com/watch?v=fjDsRvZMaXE

Whats Joost

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.
Joost provides a new way of watching TV that combines the best of full-screen television entertainment with the interactive and community benefits of the Internet to bring broadcast-quality video to viewers anytime, anywhere. Based on a state-of-the-art, secure, peer-to-peer streaming technology, Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers video content to viewers for free. Joost features more than 150 channels with programming across all genres, including: cartoons and animation; entertainment and film; sports; comedy; lifestyle and documentaries; and sci-fi. Channels and programs available on Joost vary by geographic region, based on copyright ownership.

Technology

The app is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform.
Joost is built on open source technology and open standards. To name a few: Mozilla, Apache HTTPD, Redland, Postgres, OpenSSL, RDF, SVG, XUL.

Goal

Is it possible to build a web based application that does not require any downloads, that is comparable to the downloadable executable Joost application. This mashup has been done with 1 flash file as compared to Joost which requires 100’s of files.

Browser support overview

Joost does not support browser based viewing, to use the application it must be downloaded and installed. In the last several months users have been forced to continually download and upgrade the Joost software in order to continue using Joost. The flash based version works in all browsers on all operating systems. All enhancements and upgrades are transparent to the user and the application continues to retain the user preferences since the application is hosted on a server.

Channel overview A major drawback to Joost is the limited content available to it’s users since it’s model is to distribute videos through content deals. Joost features more than 150 channels with programming across all genres, including: cartoons and animation; entertainment and film; sports; comedy; lifestyle and documentaries; and sci-fi. Channels and programs available on Joost vary by geographic region, based on copyright ownership. The flash version utilizes RSS feeds from the top web sharing sites such as YouTube, Veoh, Google, MySpace, Digg, BlipTV, MetaCafe, IFilm, Pornotube, DailyMotion, Break, Grouper, Heavy and Guba. With archiving capabilities, the number of available videos are in the tens of thousands. Since the videos for the flash version are derived from multiple web sources the content is growing exponentially.

Playback overview Joost is based on P2PTV technology. The Joost P2P technology isn’t always reliable, however, as some users report getting a “This program is unavailable right now. For some reason we can’t show you the program right now. Sorry about that. Try again later or try another program.” after waiting for a few minutes for programs to start. When this happens with one program, it frequently happens with all programs. The flash version load time is practically instantaneous, there is also a built in mechanism on the backend system to perform an hourly check to ensure videos are still available to avoid issues Joost is currently having. On the front-end detection has been implemented which will skip the video if a stream is deteced as unavailable,. thereby not casuing the player to be in a frozen state.

Video quality overview Joost’s claim to be the new TV also comes with the claim of high quality video. Granted some videos are of high quality but it is also true that some are not. The videos for the flash version are also a mix of high and low qualitity video. But over the last six months the quality has significantly improved with web sharing sites realizing that the brand of it’s company is the video.

Video overview The videos within a channel are presented in list view. The flash version has the same functionality as Joost.

Video info overview Joost provides a video info panel that dynamically slides out from within the controller once the user clicks on the “i” button. Details within the panel are video name, description and video link, a “copy link” button is also provided. The flash version has the same functionality as Joost with one additional control. A “close button” has been added since most users will have difficulty realizing to close the panel would require clicking on the same “i” button that opened the panel. The transparency of the panel has been significantly decreased since the area that this occupies is right in the middle of the video. Changing the transparency allows the functionality of the panel while maintaining the ability to more clearly see the videos.

Help overview Joost provides a help interface containing keyboard shortcuts, menu info, tooltips info. The flash version has the same functionality.

My Joost menu overview Joost provides a menu to add widgets to the interface. Widgets include: news ticker, instant messaging, a clock, invite friends, rate it, channel chat, advanced settings and blog this. The flash version contains all but 2 widgets, due to the the usefulness of the 2 widgets. One widget it contains that Joost does not have is the webcam chat widget.

Widgets overview A Joost Widget is a bundle of information that provides Joost viewers with a new facility of some kind, extending and enriching their TV experience. Some examples include a news-ticker, chat and rating tools, and an alarm clock. Widgets can be selected, enabled, and updated from within Joost. They may be stand-alone, or depend upon externally provided sites and services (for example bookmarking services, data services). The Joost Widget framework combines stylish user interface facilities with sophisticated data storage, access, and manipulation tools. Data can be stored locally or on the Web, and widgets can be given access to information about the current program being viewed, as well as interact with viewers via mouse, keyboard, or their remote control. The widgets have a transparency applied so that users are not totally blocked out from viewing any part of the video, widgets can be closed, dragged and moved, and docked in place. The flash version has support for all but 2 widgets, however it does have 1 widget that Joost does not support which is the Webcam chat widget. Users will be able to talk to each other by way of video and not need to type, isn’t this the whole idea behind “interactiveTV”.

Limitations overview Joost has major difficulties performing certain tasks unless the application window is in fullscreen mode and also when the user tries to resize the Joost application. Some features that are not enabled are “Widgets”, Joost doesn’t even try to run them, a message box in opened and prompts the user to go fullscreen. If a user is in any of the menu windows ( channel, video, search ) and the user resizes the window, the application leaves that screen and automatically goes back to the homepage. Performance becomes an issue when users are resizing the Joost application, the video and components freezing is common. The flash version do not place any limitations and is able to perform all tasks at any resolution, performance is not an issue when the user scales the window.

Chat application overview Without a doubt the most useful of all the Joost widgets is the text chat widget. Functionality includes the ability to chat with multiple users, embedding icons within your messages, ability to choose a custom nickname, list all people chatting, ability to join other rooms. Issues with the widget from Joost.com forums include the following, the current channel chat widget is for channel chat and not program chat. The mouse pointer does not work within a line of text you have created- only scrolling up/down and using arrows works to move text around before sending a message. Clicking a mouse within a line of text brings it to the end of that line only. There are Issues with basic cut and paste functionality into the textfield. The design of widget is again not consistent with other components. So while the usefulness of this widget is undeniable, the inconsistency of the widget within the Joost application and major functionality expected within a chat application leaves much to desired. The flash version allows users to text communicate with each other and is built utilizing Flash Media Server with capabilities for 2,500 users to simultaneously talk with one another. This component within flash will see a dramatic development shift from the current Joost idea of what a text chat widget is.

Personal profile overview Joost provides an interface to allow the editing of your personal profile, users have the ability to update their first name, last name, date of birth and gender. The issue I see on this component involves the design, it does not follow any of the standards for font size, window size, layout etc. This seems to happen on teams working on large scale applications, a lone developer not following the standards set by the design team and developing their own design. The flash version has all the capabilities of the Joost version and leverages off the widget framework and is thereby consistent with the rest of the application.

Player resize overview Joost has major issues with performance on resizing the window. The flash version leverages from the controller framework and presents an interface consistent with the application. There are no performance issues and resizing happens in real-time.

Search & controller functionality overview The controller contains most of the functionality of the Joost application. Users can pause, play , play next, play previous, change volume state, change channels, get video info, get channel info, seek help, edit user profile, go fullscreen and search. When the user enters a search term the search menu is shown. The flash version supports all the functionaliy of the Joost application. Enhancements made in the flash application are due to increase usability: enlarging all the buttons, enlarging text for enhanced readability, setting different transparencies for each section to separate actions.

Site details overview Each video is part of a channel, the details of each channel can be accessed by clicking on the top center button. The flash version supports all the fucntionality as the Joost application. The design of the window has been changed to match the rest of the application, also a close button has been added to allow users to exit the window. Or Joost users would have to figure out that the button on the top right of the application is the way to close the window.

Right click overview Joost does not support right click functionality. The flash version has right click functionality for the following: link to Joost.com, Edit your peronsal profile, Switch between full-screen and window mode, Standbye mode, My Joost, Search, Help with Joost. All items besides linking to Joost.com directly move the user to that part of the application and enables users from having to click multiple times to jump to certain screens.

Tooltip preference overview Joost does an excellent job placing informative tooltips throughout the entire application for all it’s components. The main issue I see with the tooltips is the length and placement of these tooltips, many times they are near sentence in length and cover other core components. The flash version supports all the functionality as Joost with the addition of a toggle button for enabling and disabling the tooltips. When users click this button all tooltips within the entire application are turned off, to turn the tooltips back on, users will simply need to click on the button again.

Ability to drag controller overview Joost places most of the functionality of the application within the controller which is placed in the lower-middle of the window. The flash version supports this functionality plus enables users to be able to drag the controller anywhere on the screen.

Dock all components overview Joost detects whether the user is actively moving the mouse and if not after 5 seconds makes all components disappear. The flash version supports the same functionality with the addition of a component which allows the user to override this setting and dock all components. This seems like an obvious feature considering the widget framework uses this functionality.

Intro overview Both Joost and the flash version run the intro screen once the application is launched. Joost should allow users to disable the viewing of this screen through a settings interface.