adir1

Are you all Joost‘ed up yet? This video platform is revolutionary and is truly disruptive to Video on the Web, and even Cable TV for home.

It’s perfectly legal too, since just like the broadcast model, it is advertiser supported. The advertisements themselves are short and non-intrusive to me, at least for now.

Anyhow, I picked up a pair of excellent Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones and used them today while cooking dinner 5 feet away from my PC to enjoy this streaming entertainment. The number of channels on Joost, and their content, is continuing to expand at grand rate. They have agreements with some major networks, though I am yet to see their programming there, and they have some full length movies, including Paramount Pictures selections.

Madonna got her own channel now, with her own classic music videos playing. There are also several music channels, like the one that I am enjoying above, called GetMusic. MTV and VH1 channels mostly featuring their shows for now, not music.

The Internet bandwidth crunch is definitely going to worsen. With proliferation with this P2P platform, alongside Skype and with growing legal movie downloads (Vongo for example), I think the major providers are just sleeping if they are not planning to triple capacity every year, starting now.

Anyhow, it was fun, and I felt compelled to blog about it, while it’s still playing in an open window on my desktop. Rock on!

So, most of you are wondering where is it I disappeared to, for the last few days. Over the labor day weekend I was learning to fly, of course!

Actually, at first I just decided to make a push as soon as I hit level 67, to reach 68 in record time. You see, level 68 is when Druids get their flying form. That is, magical creature that is Druid, it is able to morph into various animals. But the bird form is something that is achieved only on level 68 with Burning Crusade expansion.

Yes, I got bit by World of Warcraft bug again. But I have to tell you, flying is Amazing! The graphics are beautifully done, and the locales in Outlands are awesome. Mystical outer space kind of areas are just indescribable, so instead I took some screenshots, while flying. But I am sure they don’t do the game justice. So here are some more screenshots, just from the BC expansion: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, lots more.

If you get upset with my geeky fascination with this fairy tale game, don’t despair! I am planning to be back to something which should interest you much more! In the works is extensive post demystifying PodCasts (with and without an iPod) and bringing you some of the best ones in News, Enrichment, Science, and Science Fiction that I enjoy.

Meanwhile, go check out some flying mount video or druid flying form video; the latter video is similar to what my Druid character can morph into.

Oh how fast they grow up…. Seemed just not too long ago they were some kids on Disney channel. And how does it work exactly? Hollywood Records it says, but they started with Disney and I am guessing they still are with Disney, in a lot of things. But the important part is that this clip is well produced and fun, so, enjoy!

I decided to add some widgets from yourminis to my blog, but Alas, it isn’t nearly as simple as it should be. I consider myself pretty web savvy, but configuring the embed script that it generates is been nothing but trouble. Most of ones I tried are too wide for my sidebar, and resizing them breaks most of them, sad sad times…

I tried embedding simple youtube yourminis widget below, but although it showed videos, you couldn’t click to watch any of them… So, I replaced it with this direct youtube video instead. Of course, embedding from youtube took about 10 seconds and worked flawlessly. Enjoy!

Miro is a new name for old time favorite Democracy player. Along with a new name, it got a grand redesign, which I like.

It is currently my High Definition Internet Video aggregator of choice, along with old time favorite Vuze, of course.

Miro is a Free and Open-Source media player and aggregator. It collects RSS feeds (called Channels in Miro), has it’s own handy guide of channels and uses Peer to Peer technology to speed up downloads, what more can you ask for?

You can adjust each channel to either automatically download new shows, or just tell you about new shows and let you decide what to download. It also manages disk space by automatically removing old videos, after certain period of time (like a month or so) or if you are running low on space.

I also love it because of it’s amazing video playback capabilities. You can configure it to see your local video files and so far it was able to play back everything and anything I threw at it, including H.264, flv, quicktime and the good old DivX/Xvid files.

But probably all time favorite feature for many people will be the ability to download videos from YouTube (and few other Video giants) into your local library. Though, personally I don’t see any need for that.

My favorite channels on Miro right now are Timo’s Movie Trailer channel and InDigital HD. dl.tv is also among the best, and I like to be able to catch up on news via my PC and subscription to CNN In Case You missed It channel on Miro.

So, give it a try for your self.