I made it into the beta finally, and I've been having a lot of fun playing with it. Overall I like it a lot.
The good:
- The user interface: The UI is extremely easy to learn and efficient to use. It's not windows standard, but I wouldn't expect a cross platform application to conform to Windows UI conventions, and the transparent menus are a nice touch.
- The video quality: This definitely exceeded my initial expectation. It's not 1080p of course, but for streaming internet video it's great.
- Reasonable CPU load: On my 2ghz Athlon XP system running Joost puts about a 22% load on my processors. For comparison, Yahoo Go TV puts around 12 to 15%. For beta software that uses a CPU intensive codec (the CoreAVC codec that Joost uses doesn't take advantage of DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) hardware) that's pretty impressive.
The bad:
- Limited content: This is to be expected in an invite-only beta, and hopefully it will get better. Joost has already signed a content deal with Viacom, which is a good sign. If they can manage to get the regular viacom, discovery communications and food network programming then I can cancel my cable subscription ;).
- Random Commercial Breaks: Commercials are interspersed throughout the content, interviews are interrupted in mid-sentence, music videos in mid-grimace, etc. Hopefully one of the Joost guys can come up with an algorithm to look for periods of silence and/or video stillness and insert the commercial breaks there. Otherwise, it's a pretty annoying flaw.
- Video playback failure: Joost has yet to crash on me, but I haven't gone ten minutes without video playback stopping with an error message telling me that the show can't be shown to me right now and to try again later. Strangely, all I have to do to restart the video is select it again from the menu and fast forward to where I left off. It's a beta.
- Full screen mode switch glitch: I haven't reproduced this one yet, but after playing with my monitor resolution, the next time I loaded Joost and switched to window mode the window wasn't visible, even though the resolution was just slightly smaller than the one I'd used before. When I right clicked the taskbar icon and “maximized“ the window, it reappeared. It's a beta.
Overall I'm really impressed. I'm hearing great things about the media center features in Vista, and Bittorrent now has lots of legal content, but the price point of Joost (i.e. free) gives it cable killing potential that the others lack (for now).
In general the new HTPC is working well, but I was having problems with Launchcast audio streams stopping suddenly with the error “While Stopping, Network Timeout.“ Since I didn't find much information on this problem I thought I'd mention my apparent solution, which was to disable the ActiveArmor firewall that came with the NVidia nForce chipset software.
Because the problem was intermittant I'm not 100% sure that this was is the fix, but I'm going on 6 hours now with no TCP problems whatsoever.
Good luck!