Uninstalled: Joost, Leaf Networks

It's with a somewhat heavy heart that I uninstalled Joost and the Leaf Networks application on Sunday night. Both hold great promise, but fatal flaws and a better product from a competitor will keep both off my machine for now.






We've had some good conversations with the CEO of Joost, and DL.TV's agreement to appear on the service certainly alleviates some of the content problems.

But time and again, when I want to surf the Web for content, I turn to Hulu, the NBC/Fox content site I've been playing around with since just before Halloween. For example, I had a few episodes of Heroes queued up to watch (note to the writers: when you start playing around too much with the timeline, bad things happen, creatively). The problem is that I had accidentally recorded too much a few weeks ago and my Cox PVR choked on downloading new content and discarded all my scheduled "season passes".

So tonight, I logged on to Hulu, hooked my laptop up to the TV via the S-video connection, and my wife and I got caught up. Sure, I prefer my PVR. But Hulu provided adequate video, no skips, and brief 15-second commercials at the appropriate spots. Yes, I know writing a supportive post will (slightly) help Hulu's sales department sign up more ad spots, but the point is is that it works.

By comparison, Joost is the 85 other channels that I skip past.

I really wanted to like Leaf, which allows users not only to share devices across the Internet, but networks as well. It's not quite a VPN, but it does allow users to access stores of digital media files that your friends may own. I suppose part of the problem is mine; most of my friends are sort of offline media types, not university kids who rip all their DVDs to a terabyte hard drive.

So, for me, my choice is Orb Networks, which allows remote access of your media over a Web connection. And it's not even quite that, but the "WinAmp Remote" function of WinAmp's Anniversary Edition. While the app loads sloooooowwwwllllyyyy, two features set the app apart: Media Monitor, which automatically slurps down linked MP3s when you surf popular music blogs, and the aforementioned WinAmp Remote, which uses Orb to remotely connect to your media.

There are some important caveats: the WinAmp AE layout simply sucks, and the fact that you can't pause or move forward or backward in a media file is simply annoying. However, the software transcodes data on the fly, which means that the app will tailor the resolution of the video or audio data to match the available bandwidth. It works quite well in practice.

There's also one other kiss of death for both apps, and I'm not entirely sure which one is at fault: since loading both onto my desktop machine (a dual-core AMD box with 2 Gbytes of RAM), booting has become painfully slow. All my other applications will load, but then Leaf and Joost will grind out what seems like a minute more doing whatever they're doing in the background. When I see my desktop I want to, well, use it.

Joost is a beta application, and Leaf just turned the dial on a 1.0 release. I'm not writing either off yet, but neither am I storing them on my hard drive at the moment.