Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Good news, PlayStation 3 and Wii owners. YouTube has created a special site just for you to enjoy watching videos on your couch through your game console. Here's how it works. Fire up your console's web browser and enter this URL: www.youtube.com/tv. (It's not going to work on your PC or Mac) From there, you'll be able to navigate YouTube easily with simplified menus and enlarged text, and even watch videos in full-screen, and enjoy auto-play capability that "enables users to view related videos sequentially, emulating a traditional television experience." Right now, YouTube on your TV is only offered for the Wii and PS3, but look for YouTube integration in a whole host of other set-top boxes and accessories in the near future."

It just makes sense to be able to watch YouTube on the big screen, integration with the Wii and PS3 is a logical way to do that. Check out the above video if you like to see how the interface works.

"The VUDU fans who felt teased by the leak a few weeks ago can feel a little better today. Not only is VUDU offically announcing access to the previously discovered features, but in addition VUDU owners will have access to other on demand HD content from networks you've actually heard of like National Geographic and PBS -- other SD content will also be available, but really who cares about SD? What might end up being the most interesting in the long run though, is the fact that VUDU has brought this to market using its new VUDU RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform, which in the future will allow third parities to bring even more internet content to your living room. We'll have to hold our tongue on this idea until sometimes next year though, to see if anyone actually adopts it. These features are great and all, but how 'bout giving us access to our own content VUDU? Yeah we know, you're partners wouldn't like that very much, would they? The full release is after the jump."

Until now, VUDU has been a one-trick pony: digital video on demand for rental or purchase. Granted, it performed the trick very well with an amazing interface, consistent software updates, an ever-growing library including the largest collection of HD movie content, and stellar HDX video quality. With the launch of the RIA (Rich Internet Architecture) platform, VUDU has added a few more tricks including YouTube videos, a wide range of video podcasts (called OnDemand TV), and access to photos on Flickr and Picasa. For me, the new features are interesting but not nearly as compelling as its original trick. I'll have to wait and see if anyone takes them up on developing additional VUDU content using this RIA platform. Maybe access to local network content would be a good place to start?

"Do you share photos on Facebook? What about sharing sharing videos on YouTube? Well thanks to Will Duff, one of our developer interns this past summer, there are now a couple of brand new publish plug-ins for Facebook and YouTube available for download. Both plug-ins enable you to easily share your photos or videos with just a few clicks!"

Facebook is great for connecting with people... over the last two weeks I've "found" two friends I had "lost" years ago. Sharing photos and videos is great too. But uploading those photos or videos isn't as simple as it could be, particularly if you have to find the file you want to upload while still in the web browser. These two new plugins for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Movie Maker Beta greatly simplify the process. Both plugins allow you to upload photos or video directly to Facebook (photo/video) or YouTube (video only) directly within the tool. I've only tested the Photo Gallery upload to Facebook, but it's as straightforward as it appears. I like it!

A mere 15 days after I uploaded my first wide-screen video and asked YouTube to release a 16:9 aspect ratio player, they implemented it. Am I good or what? For my next feat, I'll be asking for 10,000 shares of Google stock for $1. ;-) OK, back to reality: YouTube has obviously been working on this for a while now, and it's nice to see tha they finally implemented it. Unfortunately they're not doing smart detection of the content - meaning the 99.9% of all the videos on YouTube that are in 4:3 aspect ratio will be displayed with big black bars on the right and left. Worse still, if you hard-rendered a 16:9 video to fit in 4:3 like I did with two of my videos, you end up with big black bars on the top, bottom, left, and right. Yuck! Still, at least all the 16:9 videos I'm shooting are much bigger on the YouTube page. It's great to see YouTube making this change. It still pales in quality to what I'm seeing with Motionbox, but there are some quality hacks out there that can improve the quality.

My headache now is trying to figure out the best video deployment strategy - I use the incredibly awesome TubeMogul to distribute my videos to 11 different video sharing sites at once, but many of them have 100 MB limits on the upload, so I might have to start uploading two different versions of my video - three if you count the one I upload to Motionbox. Talk about a headache...the things I do to bring you guys awesome quality videos! ;-)