Filed under: best thing, video
November 30, 2007 • 11:57 pm 0
then again, it’s still in beta…
Only morbid curiosity made me sign up for an invite to hulu.com, whose name just reeks of eau de corporate office desperation, but after having checked it out for a bit (I consider this “research” for school), I’m surprised to find myself more impressed than contemptuous. The site loads quickly, and it’s clean and well-formed. I’ve grown used to how cluttered YouTube’s gotten, but I much appreciate minimalist design.
The content offerings are good if you need to catch up on the latest episodes of shows like “House” and “The Office” (i.e., NBC/Universal and Fox shows). Like, I’m super happy to find “30 Rock” on there, and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT!!!! They also have old shows, like Bob Newhart and Woody Woodpecker. I wish they’d provide more episodes, though, rather than a partial selection. Maybe that will happen later. Unless they make us pay for those, which they very well might.
Hulu uses Flash-based video, of course, but the quality is noticeably better than what you’d find on YouTube or on those Daily Show clips on Comedy Central’s site. The video quality on Hulu is similar to what you’d find on the godawful NBC TV website proper (though I haven’t tried their proprietary player, just on principle), but Hulu’s UI is way, way better. They seem to have put a lot of effort into making the video player work smoothly and look nice, too.
For instance, the “seek” function is actually functional! The cursor is precise and it works without a hitch, which is so rare. Streaming is smooth, unlike that stoopid NBC site (yes I’m bitter). Videos even resume where you left off, if you clicked to watch something else or went to another website. I know they’re tracking our every move on the site for datamining purposes, but that is a given, and at least they’re giving us something useful out of it.
Also, you can pop out videos to resize them however you want: no longer the tyranny of “bad,” “tiny,” or “awful, blocky, full-screen.” The best size, though, is the default as displayed on the web page.
There are also buttons for feedback, writing a review, rating the episode, and sharing, and even one for learning details about the clip you’re viewing, which, if the info is incorrect, you can fix via the “feedback” button. The menus work similarly to most of the other video-sharing sites.
The coolest part about sharing a video (or embedding one) is that you can select a short clip from the video, and the way to do it is awesomely easy and intuitive. I only wish you could see thumbnails of the start and end points or something, rather than having to guess and click “preview” to check, which gets annoying pretty fast. I’d embed a video but it doesn’t seem to work anywhere right now. Here’s a video I’ve linked to on my tumbleblog, since WordPress doesn’t allow embedding.
Below the video are comments and “related” videos. The site is very easy to explore, with very few annoying things about the menu and navigation (just because Amazon uses ginormous hover-based nav menus doesn’t mean it’s cool).
Also, it’s free. The episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (featuring an impossibly beautiful Robert Redford) is as free as the latest episode of “My Name is Earl.”
The biggest downside is (surprise!) the ads. They’re about what you’d expect, appearing during act breaks like regular commercials, but that doesn’t make them any less obnoxious. But since they’re there, I wish they’d have different ads during each break, rather than, like, the same screechy Saturn commercial all three times.
Still. I was ready to heap scorn on this venture, but I can’t. Lame name aside, I like!
update: omg what is with those INTRUSIVE ads that appear above the player menu and COVER UP THE VIDEO??? BAD, hulu, BAD!!!
May 20, 2007 • 8:44 pm 0
new tech!
Since my sis now has a MacBook that comes with iSight, I stole her old webcam. I’m not sure what to do with it, though. I could become a videoblogger, but I have a face for radio, and a voice for print. Anyway, I’m just not the videoblogging kind.
I could take tons of pictures with it, but I’m not really into that, either, plus I could’ve done that already with my higher-quality digital camera, if I’d really wanted to. I’m just not the picture-taking kind.
So what is a non-exhibitionist to do? I would kind of like to set it up as a pseudo-surveillance camera for outside my window, but I think that would be really boring.
What else can I do with a webcam?
April 30, 2007 • 9:12 pm 0
what am i, a farmer?
In the midst of doing ‘research’ for one of my classes this quarter, I’ve found myself hooked on “30 Rock,” the show run by Tina Fey, and yes, the one with Alec Baldwin. Whatever. He may suck as a human being, but he’s totally got acting skillz, and is absolutely the STAR of this series. Every scene with him is hilarious. I also love the character Kenneth, for whom the description “pathologically chipper” is dead-on.
And hey, what do you know, NBC has decided to stream all 21 episodes of the show, in their entirety, in medium-quality flash video! You don’t even have to wait for the DVDs!
Highly recommended. It’s no “Arrested Development,” but it’s still pretty fun. I’m definitely screwed this quarter.
April 3, 2007 • 1:48 pm 0
data!
I went to another IS class this morning, and I think this one’s a keeper. Actually, it has to be a keeper, because we had to form groups at the end of class and the profs told us we couldn’t drop it after that.
But it’s pretty awesome. It’s a joint venture between the statistics, design|media arts and IS depts, about data. Funny enough, here’s a video that’s kind of an example of the repurposing of data – unexpected secondary uses. This one’s not a great example (the ones we were shown in class were way cooler): the most recent, and therefore relevant, part, is pretty boring. But yeah I can’t find any cooler examples right now.
So this video shows the trend in property values over the last several decades, but instead of a graph, it uses a roller coaster. Yeehaw!
update: heh, my prof actually made us watch part of this video in class a few weeks ago. lame! =D
Filed under: video
March 19, 2007 • 5:23 pm 0
Amalgamated???
We interrupt the Winter Quarter from Hell to bring you this rather entertaining video. Probably via Metafilter or BoingBoing or someplace. I found it while furiously writing a 15-page paper [but boy, am I glad that one is over!], so I didn’t really mark down how I found it.
The explanation given by the uploader should be read first:
This is a rare gem. This was a PSA that the voice-over person decided to record an “alternate” version of for fun. This comes from the archives of a local tv station. You won’t find this anywhere.
Got it? Okay, now the vid [oh, uh, the language is NSFW, so keep the sound down if you need to]:
Hahahahahaha
Filed under: best thing, video
March 6, 2007 • 10:31 pm 0
i can’t throw stones, but that’s the whole point
These are great. Well I mean, they’re not good, and they’re a little long, and amateurish, and one of them makes no sense, but! I like the “Big Idea” behind them. And this one’s my fave cuz it touches on a personal pet peeve of mine.
I discovered the video on Metafilter. This BoingBoing post about Sikh Langars was also mentioned on that thread, and I think the Mefites have a point about who the more Christ-like people are. Which is really sad.
Filed under: video
February 13, 2007 • 2:08 pm 0
midterm hell is off to a good start
I amazed myself yesterday by writing half of my 5-page paper in less than 2 hours. Normally, I wouldn’t have even started writing until about 7 hours before the paper was due, but after basically wasting the entire weekend, I sat myself down and got to work at precisely noon yesterday. By 9PM I had all the pages I needed, but I still stayed up til 3AM to refine it, and then put together my bibliography this morning. And finished early!
How early?
This paper is not even due til 6!!
Granted, it was a lot easier thanks to supersampling. In school we learned that filming images on a large area of the negative produces a high-quality image when optically reduced and copied onto normal-sized, 35mm film. This is called supersampling because the original negative contains a lot of information that makes it into the reproduced print, leading to a picture that has more resolution, detail, and depth of field when projected than if the image had initially been shot on the normal-sized film to begin with.
What does this have to do with my paper? Well, it was only a 5-pager. And I’d done enough research to write, maybe a 15-pager. So all I had to do, really, was barf out all the information I knew about the topic, weed out the crappy and irrelevant stuff, and voila! There was still more than enouh information left over to produce a submittable piece of work.
And I even had time to watch this Ze Frank’s “The Show” episode about procrastination! It must’ve performed some kind of reverse voodoo on me.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all the time I have left now. It’s way too early to begin the 2000-word report I have to write by Friday.
Whee!
November 16, 2006 • 7:43 pm 2
1 vile thing
1 thing i do *not* appreciate about my school:
Today in film class we watched a series of avant-garde films, and the first one screened was Stan Brakhage’s “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.” Now, the other four were no picnic either, and after the screening was done we were all relieved not to have to view any more disturbing videos.
Then I came home and found this all over the internet, and I realized I was wrong. This is way more chilling, and utterly loathsome. If there’s any hope for us, those cops’ careers are *done.*
