Webware

We last took a look at the iTunes plug-in The Filter way back in 2006, so it's high time to see what this alternative to the Genius playlist is up to. Of course, when it first came out there was no Genius playlist, nor a Mac version--now that there's both, does it hold up?

Certainly the most obvious benefit is that although you do need to register to use the playlist, you don't need to hand over your credit card number to this Peter Gabriel-supported plug-in. These days many people probably don't care, but to me this is a strong vote in The Filter's favor.

Paranoia aside, The Filter seems to have made some serious, quality improvements. It still uses Bayesian mathematics algorithms and evidence models to make its suggestions, and it still takes what feels like forever and a day to scan large collections. That's not an improvement, of course, but it no longer lives on top of all other windows, either.

Instead, its icon lives on the Quick Launch bar. Right-clicking accesses a context menu, and from there users can jump to Preferences, thefilter.com, or change the default playlist generation from being based on the song to the genre. Double-click on the icon and it automatically generates a playlist, as long as a track is currently playing. Aside from scanning your collection I found The Filter to be reasonably responsive, if not zippy.

The Taste Profiler is a mandatory aspect of using The Filter. Before it can recommend playlists, and before you even finish installing it, The Filter requires that you rate at least three musicians and movies. In addition to music and movies, you can also rate TV shows and Web-only video.

The overall experience is slower than using Apple's Genius playlist, probably in no small part because it's a plug-in. However, The Filter now works with Windows Media Player and Winamp, although not MediaMonkey, on the PC, so non-iTunes lovers will probably be willing to suffer through the one- or two-second delay in getting their playlist kicked back to them. Rolling in all kinds of videos make this even more useful to today's mediascape.

On Monday Boxee, the Mac, Linux, and Apple TV-only Xbox Media Center derivative, announced the immediate support of video programming from Hulu and CBS. Users are now able to access the entirety both services catalogs of movies and TV shows through Boxee's interface. I spent the greater part of last night giving it a spin and while not perfect, it's off to a tremendous start.

Unlike some of the streaming solutions I've seen on other platforms, like the unofficial Netflix Watch Instantly for Windows Media Center plug-in, the beauty of Boxee's solution is that any semblance of a browser (the platform that these video viewers were designed for) is nonexistent. The Hulu player is the same as you get through your browser, but it's been modified to run without some of the border options like the "dim lights" and full screen toggles which, when using Boxee's system, become irrelevant. Likewise, the CBS player has had its user comments and rating system removed in favor for Boxee's own community tools.

The removal of both players' UIs in place of Boxee's presents some problems. With both the Hulu and CBS video player you're able to jump around to different parts of a show. In Hulu's current iteration this isn't possible. What's worse is that the player controls are still present, but you're not able to click on them since the Boxee UI pops up to block them with any user movement. This isn't a deal breaker with short 20 minute programs, but on longer, hour-long shows it's a pain.

Catch on old episodes of Alf on Hulu, now on Boxee--along with CBS programming.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I still think one of Boxee's greater draws is not as a video player as much as being a highly capable Internet radio jukebox for multiple platforms. You're able to tap into Last.fm, the BBC, Jamendo, and standards like Shoutcast. Managing any of these services is just as easy with a remote control as it is with a keyboard. Considering most game consoles and set top cable boxes can't do this, there's some serious potential for bringing these services into your living room, where before it was only possible with a home theater PC.

Boxee remains in private beta, although is on track for a public release at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Note: CBS is the parent company of Webware's publisher CNET News and owner of the Last.fm social music service.

Browse through full episodes or clips from CBS' catalog.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adobe Systems is revamping its Media Player with a new interface and a deal that will let users of the software watch movies from Sony Pictures.

The home screen on the new Adobe Media Player 1.1 presents more shows to watch with a new interface.

(Credit: Adobe)

The interface update in the new version 1.1, due to ship Tuesday afternoon, presents users with a larger number of video shows. "There's more content that we surface earlier," said Ashley Still, senior product manager for Adobe Media Player.

The new Sony partnership means people will be able to watch full-length movies, including Jerry Maguire and Men in Black, on Adobe Media Player, she said. A total of about 600 shows and 25,000 individual episodes are available. Users can browse various content categories, selecting some as favorites, or subscribe to their own video feeds via RSS, Still said.

Also new are full-length episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, 48 Hours, The Love Boat from CBS, which expanded the content already available through its existing partnership with Adobe. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Content providers get free access to the player, and can control whether the content is available only in streaming format or can be saved onto a person's hard drive, as in the case of Epicurious shows, Still said. Content providers show what ads show and whether they're in the frame around the content or in the content itself, and the technology lets them embed ads that can't be skipped over, Still said.

Adobe takes an undisclosed fraction of the advertising revenue.

Shows can be encoded in the Flash video format, called FLV, or in H.264. The Adobe Media Player uses Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a programming foundation that lets software run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. Adobe Media Player, though, works only on Windows and Mac OS X, Adobe said.

Update 10:40 p.m. PDT: I can confirm that Ghostbusters, from Sony Pictures, is in fact available. It's broken into eight chunks, each from 7 to 15 minutes long, and the end of the first chunk has an advertisement. The screen resolution isn't fabulous, but you can at least click a full-screen button that cuts away the clutter, and you can scrub back and forth.

Later this month, Adobe will release out of beta the AIR-based Adobe Media Player that we first saw at the Web 2.0 Expo a year ago. It's a very attractive video player, needing only a more complete catalog to become a compelling product. (See the product manager's pitch and demo at the end of this post.)

As with many AIR programs, AMP is a hybrid online/offline app. If you use it while you're connected to the Net, it will download the media you're subscribed to in the background, allow you to play streaming-only files, and let you browse the AMP catalog of media. When you're offline, you're only able to watch all your downloaded files.

Many video players have gone here before.

Being an Adobe product, the player is primarily a platform for Flash videos. To compete technically with other video sites, it displays videos in up to 1080p resolution. And the interface is slick and simple.

When you want to sign up for content, there are nice TiVo-like options. For example, you can select "catch up" to start downloading a season of a show you've missed from the beginning, or you can have it show only the most recent shows.

Content publishers keep a lot of control. They're the ones who decide if their media can be downloaded to your computer or only streamed, when the media expires, and if it can be transferred. Publishers can also place ads on or around video files, and they can even send current advertising messages to run with videos that may have been sitting on a hard disk for a year already. Publishers can also direct the player to adopt skins or themes when specific media plays. Adobe keeps a portion of advertising revenues.

AMP gives you flexible fetching and saving options.

The focus on advertising sets AMP apart from iTunes, which is sales-based. Adobe will likely offer paid content subscriptions and purchases in the future, however.

AMP competes with Joost, another video service that works offline (news). As of this writing, Joost has a larger video library, although Adobe has clout that will likely help it narrow the gap.

I see AMP as a competitor to Hulu (related stories), although Adobe's Ashley Manning Still, who demonstrated the product for me, considers Hulu--an online-only Flash-based player--as complementary or perhaps a partner. But since both AMP and Hulu are competing for the same advertising revenues, I'd say that puts them at odds.

Missing from AMP, until some time in 2009 or 2010, is "multiscreen" capability--inherent support for portable media players and set-top boxes. Meantime, just hook your AMP-running laptop up to your TV. As mentioned earlier, it displays true HD video. No YouTube blockiness here.

If you want to try AMP, you can get the beta now at Adobe Labs, but you need the old beta version of AIR (also on Labs). If you want to try the shipping version, which works with the current 1.0 version of AIR, wait until later this month when AMP makes its way to Adobe's shipping download page.

Either way, do try it. It's both a good streaming player and a strong client for subscribing to and watching downloaded Flash videos.

To paraphrase Buddy Holly, every day its a-gettin' closer--closer to Songbird leaving beta. The open source music/Web browser mashup has upgraded to version 0.5 and can be downloaded for Windows, Intel-based Macs, and PowerPC Macs. It's still in beta, so this bird's definitely got some bugs and development left to go before it's ready to take flight, but the latest build is more stable than ever and includes some key milestones.

The latest edition expands device compatibility with a new device API plug-in that comes with the browser. The new media transfer protocol supports Creative's Zen, the IRiver, several Sansa, Samsung, and Sony media players as well as one phone, the Nokia N80. Users can opt out of this or any of the other preloaded plug-ins during the installation process, or uninstall them after the browser is running. The iPod device support is available as a separate plug-in, according to the publisher, until they work out stability kinks.

Another new feature lets developers create new ways of viewing your playlists beyond the standard spreadsheet, and disperse these new media views as add-ons. Mac users now get hot key support, and a code rewrite has made it easier for plug-ins to surface the Always on Top feature for the minimized media player mode. It's not clear, however, how the reworked engine for Firefox 3 will compare with Songbird, which is currently being built on a branch of the Firefox 2 code.

Songbird 0.5 supports many media-playing devices with this preinstalled plug-in.

(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)

Unlike Flock, the Web browser/social networking mashup that has a specific target audience in mind, Songbird should appeal to music lovers--potentially a far greater percentage of people. The native ability to surf the Web, play music you currently own, and discover new music all from the same application is, in my opinion, one of the first steps on the same road that Microsoft tried to force with Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla is aiming to soar beyond with Firefox 4.

If you often link to music files from your personal Web page or blog, and have some control over the code on that page, Yahoo's got an interesting tool for you. With a few lines of very simple Javascript code, you can add small "play" buttons that link to specific songs. When users click those buttons, the Yahoo Media Player launches, letting visitors play the song without leaving your page. There was a previous iteration of the Player, but it worked only on Yahoo Music and linked only to music files from Yahoo's own site.

How does it work? Judge for yourself--these are two songs from old bands on which I played bass (so I have at least a plausible claim to partial copyright). I simply followed the instructions here and here (to insert album covers). Click on the small arrows (after the page break) and they'll play right within the Yahoo Media Player at the bottom left of the page. (Worked for me on Firefox on Windows XP, your mileage may vary!)

Click the 'Read More' button below to listen to the tracks.

FixMyMovie is a new service that takes your pixelated digital video clips and does its best to fix them. The technology stems from MotionDSP's processing technology, which is similar to what's used in government intelligence operations to improve those dark and grainy security films--like you see in movies.

The entire process is fairly straightforward: Just upload and tag a supported movie file, and the service will crunch it on its servers. You get a note by e-mail when it's done. Once it's finished you can preview the first 10 seconds of the enhanced version, as well as compare before and after results live, by pressing the "compare" button. What's even cooler is a stills mode that lets you compare the before and after with an easy-to-use slider that follows your mouse. Whatever's on the left of the slider is the old, with the new on the right.

To grab the improved film, there are download options for multiple formats, including iPod-formatted H.264, Adobe Flash, and Windows Media. You can also grab quick embed code to stick it in any blog, which I've done after the break.

I tried out the service on several video clips this morning and got improved results on every single one of them. The most dramatic improvement of all was with text, which managed to turn almost unreadable pixelated words into legible sentences. Just be wary, though: The service can only handle clips up to 352x288 in resolution, which means the VGA videos from your digital camera aren't going to cut it. Older cameras, on the other hand, are fine.

FixMyMovie is launching in beta at this morning's DEMOfall conference in San Diego with $25 worth of free processing for everyone while still in its beta period. Eventually, FixMyMovie plans to charge users for the option to enhance video and still images, which can also be captured manually by users within the Flash player. I can see this service being hugely popular, as everyone wants better looking video clips, and ways to improve older, lower resolution clips.

Update: It's worth noting you need the latest beta of Adobe Flash 9 to view videos on the service (which makes the neat, live before and after feature possible). You can pick it up here, or just get a feel for what it can do with the screenshot below.

FixMyMovie did a great job with this choppy and pixelated video clip, making small bits of text actually legible.

Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber is a pretty good resource for those of us who like getting their album art from one place. It's not perfect, but it's simple in both form and function, despite being tied to the iTunes Store at the same time it helps users free themselves from it.

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Up until this afternoon I had never heard of the expression "hypervideo," although I was quite familiar with the concept having used it in video services like Viddler, and enhanced podcasts in Windows Media Player. The idea is simple--take hyperlinks and textual information, and add it to various times or positions on a video. The result is that your viewers can have added contextual information about whatever they're watching, at the moment it happens.

The hard part is the execution, and making things user-friendly. A service called Asterpix has taken a stab at it with a hypervideo service that lets users build their own link-infested videos, complete with visual cues that tell you when you can access the added URLs and notes. While watching a video that's been enhanced on Asterpix, you won't notice much besides a small glowing circle that will show up on a person or object, and track them as they move. When you mouseover the notification, the video will pause, and you'll get a little page full of whatever text or links users have added to the video.

The actual process of adding these links takes two-steps. The first is picking the video you want to annotate. This is managed through the integrated search tool, which will scour YouTube, Google, MySpace, Brightcove and MTV to let you find whatever you'd looking for. Unfortunately you can't just plug in a video URL from one of these services, but if you know the title, you're good to go. The second step involves maneuvering a box around any object in the video clip and adding a description, URL, and tags. To do this, you simply need to highlight the object with a box. The service will do its best to track the object you've tagged, which it managea to do really well with on clips where there aren't quick cutaways.

The end result is a video experience that is slightly disjointed due to starting and stopping videos, coupled with various flashing indicators that pop up on the screen. If you're just in it to watch the video, you can turn the notes off, or click the link to watch the video on its original site. Also, if you're trying to avoid the flashing indicators altogether, there's a index on the left that shows all the notes for the entire clip. Clicking any of them will jump you right to the spot, complete with annotation.

I actually prefer Viddler's approach to this entire concept with their timed tags and comments, which are visually separated into two groups by color. The only downside with that system is that you can't call action to what's going on in certain part of the screen, and with more than 30 or 40 comments on a short video, things get a little hectic. However, when you scale Asterpix's approach to visual tagging, the entire screen will be covered in little pulsing indicators--not exactly viewer-friendly.

For other solutions that do visual video annotation with existing videos, see BubblePly and the currently defunct Click.TV.

Tag people or objects in a video with Asterpix. In this case, we're annotating Erica Ogg's face for the sake of identification.

(Credit: CNET Networks)