The web-only challenge: tackling audio & video entertainment
My temporary attempted boycott of desktop client apps enters the fourth full day today. Since I constantly have background music while working, one of the first items to tackle was entertainment. There’s no way to cover every option out there in a single blog post, but I can share what I’m doing at the moment. Up to now, I was alternating between free, online music streaming and occasional playback of music I’ve purchased. The online streaming obviously continues and my long-time favorite service, Pandora, is getting a heavy rotation right now. I have a tab in Firefox always set to Pandora and they have a nice New Age Mix station that works for me.
Although Pandora is a web service, I wanted to have a little control over it and not have to leave any other tabs in my browser. Enter the FoxyTunes Firefox extension (a 562 Kb download) that resides in the bottom of the browser full time (shown above). From here, I can stop, start, pause and generally control everything I need in a media player. The best part? You can use FoxyTunes with many audio client players and web services, so if Pandora’s not your thing, that’s no problem. It works with WMP, iTunes, Last.fm, Musicmatch Jukebox, RealPlayer, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Jukebox and many more services.
I thought about folks that own a bunch of music, even though I don’t. I did see some successful efforts at storing an iTunes music library online with Amazon’s S3 service and then streaming, but that can get pricey in terms of bandwidth. The most promising approach I saw was with Lala. Using their Music Mover, you can upload your music library to their servers and stream for free. If they already host the title, you won’t waste time uploading a duplicate, which is nice for the initial set up. The major drawback is that tunes with DRM can’t be streamed. Luckily for me, the majority of my purchased music is DRM-free thanks to CD ripping over the past several years and due to purchases through Amazon’s MP3 store. I may try Lala yet, but again, I don’t have tons of purchased music. I’ll do a follow up if I go this route.
Another option is that FlyTunes service for the iPhone we covered before. Since you can preview and use it on the web to simulate how it will work on your phone, it’s not a stretch to just leave it running in a browser tab. Some channels are optimized for slower EDGE connections, so this might be nice for Sony UX device owners that have integrated EDGE.
Sometimes, music just isn’t enough and I need to take a break with some video. I don’t need to tell you that there are a ton of options out there, so I won’t go into that much. YouTube is fun every now and again, but my current fave is Hulu, which offers many full-length television episodes for free. Unfortunately, Hulu isn’t available world-wide, so it’s not even an option for many of you. Since I’m not traveling the world much these days, maybe some of our foreign readers can offer some options here.
Again, there are mulitude of web-only audio and video options so there’s no point in my trying to cover them. I’m simply sharing what I’ve settled on and I have to say, it’s working quite nicely. With connectivity, a minimally powered netbook or UMPC with very limited storage capacity, you can easily enjoy digital audio and video media. No client app needed!
Update on the video front: news just came across my feeds about the NewTeeVee station, a site that cuts through "noise" on the zillions of videos out there and offers what they think is the best of the best. Sounds like a useful bookmark to me. Sadly, none of our jkOnTheRun videos made the cut just yet. We’ll have to raise the bar, I think.
FoxyTunes must be discuonted as not a real cloud app.
After all, you have to download and install something to use the service (in this case a FF extension) which means it does not follow the mantra ANY browser, anywhere. Indeed if you are using IE instead of FF in an internet cafe, it just doesn’t work.
True enough, but let’s back up a second. By your definition, Firefox itself isn’t even IN the “cloud computing” picture unless it’s pre-installed on your device, right? After all, I had to download it and install it on my UMPC. And where does Firefox Portable come in? I can take a USB key to the internet cafe and use Firefox on a PC there.
Ten of us could debate the definition of “cloud computing” and probably come up with eleven different opinions. (See James’ thought provoking post on this very topic a few days ago) In my experiment, I’m comfortable using Firefox and small extensions with web services. The point of this is to see how well a UMPC, MID or netbook with limited processing power and storage capacity can rise to the challenge.
Awesome Kevin. Will you post at the end which and how many extensions you have installed on FF? Have you noticed a worse performance on the browser?
I think cloud computing can include some client software as long as the data is on the cloud.
I recommend Joost for video. It has no ridiculous DRM issues preventing me from watching content just because I live outside the US and the quality is good. I am watching the 3rd season of Earth Final Conflict free of charge right now. Joost gives me hope that IPTV might actually be good one day.
The one thing that I do not like about it is that there is no linux version of the client. It could also use more content.
Jose, I do plan to list extensions and their sizes when I complete the journey. I don’t want to make ANY judgments on browser performance right now for one particular reason: I’m using a release candidate of a browser that I’ve tweaked in order to use extensions that may not be compatible. As one of the Mozilla developers who stopped by said: it’s unfair to criticize the browser in what’s an essentially unsupported and unintended configuration.
That will change when the production version comes out and extensions are updated, of course.
Don’t tell anyone, but Hotspot Shield (a “free” ad-supported VPN) will let you appear to be in the US.
That reminds me, I need to catch up on BSG on Hulu.
Very valid point Kevin.
Maybe where we need to look is “standards”. With what you are doing, you can do it with a browser. Any browser in it’s default configuration.
So just about any PC (small or otherwise) comes with a browser pre installed these days. So does my smart phone. Hey even my Wii has a browser on it.
So maybe the goal here needs to be the any device anywhere. If we can get this then surely we don’t need powerful machines at all. Just something that can run the browser.
Of course the fear has to be what IE8 will bring. Suddenly standards will actually matter (I am sure the irony that this is MS doing it isn’t lost) and that might actually break things.
Thanks Scott_H.
I’ll try it tonight.
And don’t worry I won’t tell anyone.
I’m with Mark Roddis. When you’ve finished this little experiment (it’s a good one) how about doing the same thing but using different types of devices – non-PCs etc. I think you’ll find it a lot harder.
Thinking about streaming audio and video gets me wondering about the entire cloud test. I like to stream audio a lot using Pandora and sometimes I even do that over EVDO a bit. When I do that I keep an eye on the time because I could easily fly past my 5 GB cap on Verizon’s EVDO usage. This makes me think that one of the true values of cloud computing is when you are mobile, maybe on 3G like I am a lot. This could easily start causing you to bump up on your carrier’s cap for 3G bandwidth so it makes me question the utility of always working in the cloud, especially when you have access to a normal broadband connection. Hmm.
Kevin, I don’t know if you still have XM, but you can stream that as well as Sirius over the net and it works on WM and the iPhone. IF you have another PC,NAS,Home Server etc on the net you can stream your content from that as well via Orb, Web Guide, etc. They are pretty easy to setup.
There are also free radio station streaming via the streamcenter,http://www.thestreamcenter.com/ from around the world.