Getting Joosted « Life is grand

Getting Joosted

(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)

I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.

I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.

So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)

So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.

So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.

I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.

So, what about the video?

It didn’t work.

I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.

Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.

I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.

I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 8:41 pm and is filed under AAA, Application, Software, TV, bandwidth, joost, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.