The Underscore Archives

Paul Deane wrote:
>  would be interested to get people's thoughts on Joost? (bit late on
> this thread - I've got a couple of invites if anyone still needs one)
> 
> I have it running on a PC with a standard ADSL connx and its very slow.
> I keep telling myself when the network of users increases this will
> improve, and it is their speciality, but right now, it just don't work.

I've been using it over BT ADSL from Bristol (Montpelier fwiw) and in 
general  I get fine quality. Last week I watched the entire series of 
Total Recal 2070. It had annoying hiccups (known issue see [1]) in a 
couple episodes, but the rest was pretty fine and TV-like. It certainly 
does need healthy bandwidth, ... and maybe not all ADSL delivers enough, 
... but from all I've heard here, the P2P effect is kicking in nicely. 
There's a hell of a lot of optimisation going on, too. So I'm pretty 
optimistic. But if it didn't work for you, it didn't work for you (and 
btw if folk here are betatesting, do please send feedback (under "help" 
/ report a bug within the client, or use the forums or feedback form at 
http://www.joost.com/support/).

Oh, reminds me... what's the best site for testing one's ADSL 
connection, to see what bandwidth you get in reality?

> Interesting interface. I'd rather it was on a set top box than my PC. I
> would watch it on my TV too - 24x7 extreme sports videos on demand
> without a sub. That's gotta be good.

Yeah, that'd be fun (except the sport bit). Am happy enough plugging my 
MacBook into a telly for now tho. Re UI, ... you can expect to see 
developer APIs for making extension widgets, ... details should emerge 
in not too distant future. That opens up possibility of folk making 
their own thingies for navigating around. I've been hacking on a simple 
tagger widget and it was pretty easy to get something basic running. Bit 
of javascript, bit of markup, and only minor swearing. I wish I could 
blah blah on about this a bit more, ... but it's best to wait until the 
official API's nailed down and published. If anyone's interested on how 
it works, there are links to presentations and upcoming talks (anyone 
going to Xtech btw?) at http://opensource.joost.com/ ... basically it's 
built on top of Mozilla so folk happy hacking in that environment should 
feel at home making Joost widgets. That's the plan anyway :)

cheers,

Dan



> p

[1] http://www.joost.com/blog/2007/04/fine-tuning.html