A rather bleak home page greets me when I go to www.mtvmusic.com to watch the miracle that is the MTV Music website, where we now can watch music videos, all for free, right there in the web browser. The home page has a rather pretty lead image, well, a number of images in fact, but below that, there’s just an unbalanced column of video thumbnails with the title “Vintage Videos”. But who cares?! I want my Run DMC!

You can even embed the videos! A very nice initiative by MTV Netwworks. But the website doesn’t seem all that… developed. Well, it is “Beta”. The FAQ page says “Coming soon… ” with the page title “Copyright”, and as you can see in the column to the left, the information about the video, comments and rating is rather confusing. There’s no call to action below the Rate This Video title for one. And the comment for this video is inaccessible. If you look under MTV Music API, there’s a note stating “For now, registration is only required for commenting in our forums.“, but that’s the forums. I figured maybe you have to be logged in to view the comment, but there’s no way to register! Nor to sign in!

I’m not all that impressed by the quality of the videos, but I’m not the one to complain. The audio sounds pretty good, I guess that’s more important. Maybe the video quality will improve in time like when YouTube rolled out “High Quality” videos, but I wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

So after a few minutes of digging around, watching some dandy videos, I thought “What about censorship?”. So I tried searching for the word “F*ck” (spelled out properly of course, don’t ask me why this particular search term, I just wanted to search for something dirty), and I got this semi censored result:

Pretty funny ey? I also watched the notorious video “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. and it was the clean version. This doesn’t necessarily mean they censor videos though. I can’t think of a song that includes a dirty word that might tell me if they do censor videos at the moment, but I’m sure you can find one if you start digging through the archives.

Yo, VIP! Let’s kick it! Alright, Stop!

Word to ya mother

My spontaneous reaction when launching the new Boxee version is “Wow, the new version of Boxee surely is a massive update”. And the reaction is a very positive one!

The interface has got a major facelift since the previous version release. The design and layout looks much better and is more useful, and maybe even slightly more intuitive. It makes more sense in a way. It also runs better in general. The release comments stated that this new version has some performance improvements, and I do notice them. It feels less laggy, more light in a way. Internet streaming and caching information seems to work better, and I have not yet experienced an application crash like I did a few times with previous release.

But perhaps the biggest news in the new release is the successful integration with the content from the massively popular Hulu.com, a real cool website offering free streaming media of all kinds. Unfortunately, me being in Sweden, this feature is useless to me any anyone else residing outside the US. That being due to the fact that no videos can stream outside the US due to rights management. Hulu have simply not as of yet obtained the rights to stream content outside the United States, at least if you believe their website, which truly shines with its lack of updates. I have sent an email to them today asking about this, begging for at the very least, an update on the matter, but am yet to hear back from them.

There are some bugs, such as when you are running windowed mode, like I do on my computer right now, having it running in the background, it switches over to fullscreen mode every now and then. When a video ends or when you navigate, it simply switches to fullscreen for some reason. The second bug, a more annoying one, is if the internet streamed video is stalling, if the playback catches up to the stream buffer, the video simply stops and sends you back to the screen where you chose the video, instead of pausing and continue playback when the buffer is big enough. The pause method being what one might be used to from say… every streaming video player on the internet?

A third bug, if you can call it that, is that the interface is not built to run on a 4:3 ratio TV/Monitor. I installed the Boxee application on a computer using a standard 21 inch 4:3 monitor, and it looked… well, not good. Videos does not get stretched or in anyway corrupted, just the Boxee interface when you browse the application.

My first impression of Boxee has certainly passed and progressed more into a more aware, thought through evaluation of an application with some true potential. I still feel, for my personal use, the whole community style interaction is overkill. However, the way the application per se is developing, I can absolutely see this as an alternative to Front Row. The only downside to using Boxee would be that I can’t sync my iPod/iPhone to the media, as I can with the Podcasts I download with iTunes and the media I run through it. So for that purpose, it’s not a true winner. But still pretty freaking awesome!

Some other snags you occasionally run into are the feeds not loading properly. Like right now, none of the feeds on the starting screen are loading. Not even “Recently Used” or “Recently Added”, but mostly it’s the other two, “Recommendations” and “Friends Activity” that doesn’t load. As well as some internet streaming feeds, they just throw you an error message saying “Failed to load stream” or something like that.

Just look at those “Public Torrents”! Dick Tracy, Sherlock Holmes etc… They really did go the extra mile, that’s for sure. Built in Torrent client… dang. Just FYI, if you’re planning on using Boxee and its built in Torrent client, you should read up on Port Forwarding for your router, for best performance. I’ve tried some downloads, they’re still downloading, not the speediest of trackers, but yeah… Still Alpha.

The Boxee application is a software application that runs on Mac and Linux, and will also run on Windows machines in a near future. Boxee is a Media Center type app that allows you to browse your local media, as well as network distributed folders and internet streaming media. You can manually add network sources and they will become available under say “Videos” tab if you have video files. But you can also browse per resource, more Finder or Explorer style if you will, to find media in a certain folder or drive.

The internet streaming feature is a cool feature that makes use of PodCast type XML files, the same way iTunes does with PodCasts, and you can watch any stream without having to subscribe to any of them. They’re just there. Although this is a way to simplify things, I can definitely see some issues in the horizon if people start adding their sources to this, as it’s all Open Source. The library can probably grow significantly pretty fast, making it hard to browse. Just like I feel it’s hard to browse my media library using the “Videos” or “Music” tabs. I have to much media available, so it’s better to go via Resources and go straight to whatever resource I’m looking for.

Boxee is in private Alpha testing mode right now, but it’s running surprisingly well for an Alpha app. Although that’s what the software development scene has turned into. A Beta release is more of a 95% functioning application nowadays than a buggy pre-release of the app. Some of the navigation confuses me and is a bit unintuitive, but I suppose one will learn in time by doing, or it might even change. There is an updated version out in a matter of hours of typing this, and I’m no doubt gonna check out that updated version and post any fixes and updates worth mentioning.

The start screen gives you information about what media has been recently used in your account. You can log in with different users, so it’s all personal. It also shows you a stream of recommended media, what your friends are watching and what has been recently added for your within your system or network resources at your disposal. You have your own account where you can add friends as a social network, where you can recommend media and see what others recommends and are watching, if they (and you) choose to share that information. You can also use your last.fm account to listen to music, and share what you are listening to, but my experience with the last.fm plugin is very buggy with failing to retrieve streams and such, but that might obviously improve.

Using the Internet Videos feature is pretty neat and works pretty well. Although the interface is pretty slow and laggy due to the real-time downloading of information, which also occurs when browsing the network resources to some extent. Browsing YouTube or the CNN channel works pretty well and is a really nice feature, and I’m happy they managed to implemented so well. Let’s just hope they crack a way to implement say Hulu streams into this thing. Now I just have to figure out how to get my local 24/7 news web-TV stream in this thing.

The Pictures tab can be a bit confusing. Apple’s Mac OS X is built to make everything easy for the end user. But the back end is not as simple, and when accessing your iPhoto library with Boxee, this becomes an issue. If you look at the above picture you can see the folders iPhoto creates “behind the scenes” if you will, folder that the end user doesn’t see or use normally. But now when browsing for photos, you have to choose between Auto Import, Data, Originals, Contents, Modified and iPod Photo Cache. Well, at least I do. However, you can choose to browse any folder if you have them stored in an orderly fashion under say Pictures folder on yous Mac, so this doesn’t have to be a confusing factor. But hopefully, this will be caught by the Boxee developers and maybe they can hide irrelevant folders by default.

Above you see the Settings screen, which is a pretty rich interface with a lot of options to play around with. I am running the app in window mode right now which is achieved by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard, but it runs natively in fullscreen mode, and it looks really good! Will I be using this instead of Front Row? Ehh. I will no doubt give this more of my time and keep playing around with it. But honestly, I’m not positive I need the whole socializing thing. Actually, for me, that’s overkill and I’d rather be without it. But overall, it does have more features I DO like than Front Row or my Xbox 360. But realistically, if I sit down in front of the TV, I’m looking to watch my media or listen to my music, so personally, I wouldn’t mind sticking with Front Row for that purpose. But that’s in my living room, in the future, when I’m done playing with this app. Well, I still love the internet streaming… Who knows!?

What I would LOVE to see, is a Spotify plugin for Boxee! How awesome wouldn’t that be? You would need to use a keyboard though, since it’s search based… But I’m sure they can make something really useful out of that! The radio feature perhaps?

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Read more at Boxee.tv, Boxee Blog, Appletell and CrunchGear

Nu tar Universal steget och utmanar de illegala sajterna med gratis nedladdning på nätet. En första version av tjänsten lanseras i december.

Vivendi Universal, världens största musikkoncern, kommer via internetsajten Spiralfrog erbjuda gratis nedladdning av musikfiler på internet i Nordamerika. En så kallad betaversion av tjänsten lanseras i december. Universal Music Group (UMG), som ingår i Vivendi-koncernen, är ledande i branschen och hade i fjol en marknadsandel på 25,6 procent.

U2, Eminem och Elton John ingår
Bland bolagets artister finns världskändisar som U2, Eminem och Elton John. “Unga konsumenter kommer att få ett övertygande och lättanvänt alternativ till piratsajterna”, säger Spiralfrogs vd Robin Kent i ett pressmeddelande. Det var på tisdagen oklart om det även blir en europeisk version av tjänsten i framtiden enligt Amy Levin, taleskvinna för Spiralfrog. Enligt Kent kommer sajten att bli ekonomiskt hållbar om annonsörerna är relevanta för den unga publiken. Målgruppen för satsningen, musikkonsumenter mellan 13 och 34 år, beskrivs samtidigt som “en dröm för annonsörer” av vd:n.

Nedladdning växer kraftigt
Marknaden för nedladdning av musik på internet omsatte i fjol 1,1 miljarder dollar och växer kraftigt. Den domineras för närvarande av Apples Itunes, som säljer musikfiler för nio kronor styck på den svenska marknaden. Enligt tidningen Financial Times har Itunes omkring 80 procent av den legala marknaden för nedladdningar av musik från nätet. I fjol såldes 60 miljoner mp3-spelare, som används för att lyssna på de nedladdade filerna och antalet nedladdade musikfiler uppgick totalt till 420 miljoner, enligt branschorganet IFPI:s senaste rapport. Men musikindustrin brottas sedan länge med piratsajterna, som enligt IFPI står för 98 procent av nedladdningarna på nätet. Hur artisterna, vars alster kommer att finnas på Spiralfrog, ska få betalt är ännu oklart. Spiralfrog förhandlar samtidigt med andra musikkoncerner om samma typ av avtal som det som nu träffats med Vivendi Universal.

Source: expressen.se