Turn up the Joost

I'm looking for an invite, so if anyone around's got one... thanks.

Very looking forward to it, but I didn't know we would have to pay for it when the beta is over, although I guessed it.
Tim, what's your internet connection ? What is the minimum to be confortable ?
EDIT : saw the lag issues...

We had James Murdoch in the office recently, and when talking about Sky's future he outright dismissed net TV for Sky (in the near future), simply because the current level of tech can't support the quality that Satellite/Cable/Terrestrial can deliver.

We are not there yet, but be in no doubt this is the future, truly on demand content.

Good review, I was concerned about what the quality would be like on standard use broadband.

What internet connection did you have by the way? 512K, 8MB, 24MB? Was it Cable or ADSL.

Nice review.

I would love to use it and hope 4MB connection is sufficient.

Does anyone have an invite they are willing to give me?

;)

Interesting, this is defenently the future

loving joost at the moment, spesh for the kids tv

however because i'm a UK user i don't get national geographic or comedy central, i have to go and turn on ntl/vm for that

Originally Posted by fev
however because i'm a UK user i don't get national geographic or comedy central

It would be nice to see these available to us UK users, can't see it happening though. But for a free service, it's actually really good.

I have beta and even on a 2meg connection it was suprisingly smooth and no pauses etc. VERY impressed and if the content is right I'll be happy to pay for it

Nice, and if anyone has an invite i'd love one :P

I've also not noticed any dramatic quality issues apart from different channels seem to be encoded differently.
National Geographic and I believe MTV aren't available to us in the UK however and I found the quality of the available programs to be poor or shows that I've seen before, obviously though it's still in beta but I find myself only watching it maybe every couple of days due to the lack of anything I enjoy actually being on there, which equates to about my normal TV viewing anyway.

invites are so rare nowadays !! Wish someone in the BT community could spare me one.
(i'm only saying this because I want one)

I've also got the beta... performance, even at college, is rather poor (although our connection is awful, and I'm pretty sure that the traffic gets throttled to boot), and I'm rather disappointed by both the video quality and the actual amount of content available. As net connections get faster and more companies sign on, that should theoretically go away, so not all hope is lost.

It's an amazing concept to say the least. But without some real improvement, you'd be nuts to pay for it.

Anyways, I've got a few invites left (I got three, sent them out pretty quick, and got five more, just gave a couple of those away too) - lemme know if you want one

A side note - at the time of writing, I was unaware that Joost has made a recent announcement that it will remain free to use as a service, instead being promoted by advertising revenue. I wish I could find the sources for my original assertion that it will be subscription based, but I will change the article to reflect this information. In effect, this is a little more worrying to me - there don't seem to be enough ads to support the content that Joost is offering.

My internet connection at the time is a 1MB Cable, Doug :)

I'm not sure what the cable specs are in the US, is it 440~k up or 250~ or higher?

I have been in joost beta for ages, its an allright service, i wish they had mythbusters and the simpsons, those shows would be watched all the time, i have a 5mb line at work and never have these issues with quality

when can i get this? how much is it? is it going to be free? or only if you're invoted by a friend? i dont get it lol but i would like it

Fifth Gear sucks. >_>

good: 2mb pipe cable is good enough for quality shows here in canada, no lag other than waiting for it to start....quality is great, altho not excellent. easy to use, etc.
bad: no NationalGeographic channel here in BETA in Canada.... other channels are pretty much crappy....

summary: not enough content for Canadian viewer. without content, quality and technology is useless.... id just turn on my TV and thats the end of it... sorry...

Just thought I'd give my €0.02 concerning the video quality

From what I've seen it seems like the few times you actually get a really clean couple of frames is right after a keyframe, but only until the content changes more or less dramatically.

What that tells me is they've encoded this video with too few keyframes and at an awful bitrate using a lousy encoder...

Hopefully they'll deliver some greater encodings with more accurate keyframing once the service goes out of beta.

Otherwise I don't see myself using it.

BTW I'm on a 20mbit line and I get lag and really low res as well. I hope that's why it's beta.

Originally Posted by DougEdey
I'm not sure what the cable specs are in the US, is it 440~k up or 250~ or higher?

Really depends on location. Some people can only get DSL, which is a good amount slower than cable. The cable I had was 6Mbit down, 768k up, but I think that was above average. I think ~2Mbit down, ~256k up (if not slower) isn't at all uncommon.

Originally Posted by Firehed
Really depends on location. Some people can only get DSL, which is a good amount slower than cable. The cable I had was 6Mbit down, 768k up, but I think that was above average. I think ~2Mbit down, ~256k up (if not slower) isn't at all uncommon.

Actually my DSL connection is faster than my cable connection but it's all down to the individual ISPs. Either way, it's nasty laggy at the moment. No chance to really test it until Thursday night though. & again, a big Thank you for the invite ;)

allow me to shed some light on the quality switching.

with real time video streams, especially in use cases like IPTV, you want to start the stream as quickly as possible to allow channel hopping. this means having a really short buffer in comparison to, say, soemthing like a quicktime trailer, which typically buffers for a good while before starting to play.

another thing. realtime media needs a fairly constant throughput. TCP inherently is a bursty protocol. if you plot TCP transfer rate against time it will be a sawtooth, with it dropping to half of the highest transfer rate just after the apex. this SUCKS for multimedia streams, since it realy screws with your buffer (you need a bigger one than really necessary), which we already said needs to be as short as possible for IPTV.

so, we are left with using UDP. this is fine but provides no measurements in place for quality of service. in TCP, you send a packet, it gets there. UDP, you just start up sending packets (there's no handshake, setup or teardown, you literally just start throwing **** at the receiver. it used to be a fairly common DOS attack, which is why a lot of coporate routers block UDP). you have no guarantee of getting packets, and no acknowledgement of the packets that were received successfully. People get around this by using their own control protocols alongside UDP, though.

right, so we have a short buffer, and we are doing our own packet recovery techniques.

the intenet drops packets. it will happen, it's an inevitability. routers are programmed to preemptively drop packets even when not congested to keep things that way, so at some point we will have to deal with packet loss in our streams. because of our short buffer, there is often SIMPLY NO TIME to wait for the timeout, send a request for a retransmission, and decode. so what is implemented is some kind of error correction. whether it be parity or more advanced mathematical methods, they all involve sending redundant packets, following the 'safety in numbers' ideaology.

now there is one method called media independent FEC (Forward Error Correction), which involves sending two versions of the data - one high quality, one really low quality. If a packet is dropped and there is no time to resend the data, you fall back to the low quality data for as long as needed, until you can jump back up to the higher quality.

To be fair on joost, this is utterly due to the nature of the internet which really wasn't ever designed for low delay, high bandwidth multimedia applications. the guys are doing an amazing job trying to hide the technicalities from us and they should be applauded for that.

A couple of the reasons for the drops in quality could well be on their side, too, like an overly congested server or their infrastructure causing congestion, but yeah, most of the time it's an unreliable link.

ok that turned out to be an essay. hope it was interesting.

Originally Posted by g3n3tiX
I'm looking for an invite, so if anyone around's got one... thanks.

I'll send you an invite mate.
Give me an e-mail address via PM.

This would be my last invite. I picked up the first request in this thread. Sorry but I haven't got any more invites.

Ciao

I've been in the joost beta for quite a bit now, and I must say that as the service has grown so too has the lag on the service. As it is p2p based it is prolly a good idea to leave it connected when your system is on so it can do it'sd p2p goodness, this way it helps to reduce the lag.

One thing it does have going for it is the interface, as this has changed greatly since I first started using it.

found an issue... left pc on overnight... joost on standby. Wake up this morning to this

http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/9194/screenss9.jpg