Joost comes out in a flash

October 14, 2008

Image representing Joost as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Joost has finally completed it’s second coming. Right, Joost updated it’s offering by moving to a new social web site plus a web plugin a month ago… but what everyone was waiting for was for the new Joost flash based solution.

Over the last few days Joost has been testing the new client… sometime rendering it’s service unusable in the process… for example triggering a schizophrenic page reload in a loop. But now all appear stable and running just fine with the new flash based player.

Joost finally saw the light regarding flash. I had proposed they move to this platform a year ago but was told by a few people that this was not on the roadmap and that a plugin was more in line with the vision… obviously they where right and I was right but in the long run I am sure that only the flash flavor will remain.

As soon as the flash solution became available I removed the plugin from my system. I hate to see it consume CPU cycles after I leave Joost web site. Now with the flash client all is done when I leave Joost site.

What kind of technology does Joost use? Apparently a simple flash front-end to an mp4 encoded h.264 video stream and AAC audio. If I was Joost I would be a bit worried about getting my content “captures” as one can easilly download the whole file and save it to the HD be simply using QT to open the same web link the player use. For example: link to joost source video.

Joost apparently corrupt the h.264 video stream making it very hard (but not impossible) to edit. It is also possible to upload it to other platform like youtube (Joost… be nice to me, I am only pointing the obvious ;-)). Uploading the Joost saved video linked above to youtube give the following result:

The video quality in the flash player is the same as what you use to get with the plugin… therefore I suspect you get the same file as the plugin minus the encryption bits.

This is truly the second coming of Joost and is a welcome one. Hopefully more and more content deals will now be made to make Joost a viable competitor to hulu… or at least a viable complement of hulu… essentially filling the space that is currently left empty.

Update:

I noticed Joost is employing download throttling on the video download to only serve up fast enough to allow for continuous realtime playback. This is a sort of deterrent to Joost video copy as it make it painfully slow to copy content… essentially you can’t copy faster than realtime.

JoostTeam

Joost comes out in a flash

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JoostTeam

Joost comes out in a flash

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