the "DownloadHelper" plugin for Firefox allows you to download any embedded video as long as the video can be fully buffered to the hard drive. that means it works with YouTube, but it doesnt work with Hulu. depending on the protocol in use, it's possible to use "Orbit Downloader" to save a video stream, but again, it doesnt work with Hulu.
there are a few ways to improve video playback on Hulu's website. depending on your PC, on my P3-700Mhz FX 5500 i need to employ the 3 tricks below. on my Athlon 3000+ GeForce FX 5500, however, i only need to employ the first 2.
1) r-click the video and choose QUALITY > LOW;
2) change the computer's resolution to 800x600;
3) watch the 296p version of the video. just click on the EMBED button and copy the video URL to your address bar; not all videos have an EMBED option, though.
$98 is too much even for Word itself! besides, how great is XML editing in Word 2007? on version 2003 it just looks like a lame-ass text editor. however, if the lawsuit referred to Microsoft's free XML Notepad 2006, i would understand the reason for *some* of the ado. it's a great utility. butit it isnt worth more than $20 either.
strange. my Firefox 3.0.10 got somehow affected by this outage. it just refused to open! it loaded about 30Mb of data to RAM but went nowhere from there. the browser window never appeared. and i tried to re-launch it several times, but for no avail!
very odd.... anyone else had problems with it? Opera -- although not able to open Google.com -- opened fine!
Is Firefox tied to Google like E.T. was tied to Elliot?
i never watched videos at ABC.com because the site always required more than i was willing to install (or mess) in my PC. i just decided to give them another try and see what their current requirements for streaming videos are.... and guess what? surprisingly -- they changed it! however -- not surprisingly -- the new requirements are still too restrictive. currently, their videos wont play (and, given their nature, that really isnt any loss) just because i'm a happy user of Win2000.... O.o
TNT is another loser who will eventually take their content to Hulu. on TNT.com the user is required to install some Microsoft DRM plugin crap.... those companies shoot themselves in the foot when they make their sites so picky! with Hulu, it just works! you only need a browser (ANY!) and the Flash plugin. it has never asked me to install anything! btw, YouTube and PBS have got some shows online as well....and they also just work!
the other thing i like about Hulu is their choice of Flash player. it exposes the QUALITY options (HIGH, MEDIUM and Low), which can be the difference between a choppy and a smooth playback. i hope they dont remove it (seems to be the trend)!
what's with that anyway? many websites are doing away with the QUALITY option and just imposing the (more resource-intensive) HIGH setting! geez, sometimes that setting makes Flash just plain unwatchable in my Athlon 3000. why are developers removing an option that is actually useful?!?! it was fine the way it was before when it defaulted to HIGH but let you change it. what's next? are they going to remove the FULLSCREEN option too?
and no, kid! i'm not gonna retire my perfectly functional Atlhon 3000.... or my Pentium 3 700MHz! now get off my lawn!
i wish TBS and TNT made their streaming service less bureaucratic. last time i checked they required the installation of a Windows Media Player plugin that worked less than perfect on Firefox.
the real question to me is what the heck has happened to Hulu's service for the last month? i used to have great playback even on my Celeron 800Mhz Tablet, but now all i get is dropped frames -- even on my Athlon XP 3000+!
last year i watched all the episodes of "Arrested Development" and was surprised by both the quality of the series (it was new to me) and the quality of the streaming. it only took me the first 60sec of AD's episode 1 to turn me into a big Hulu fan! i even got into the habit of watching movies there afterwards.
the chopped playback doesnt seem to be a bandwidth issue because the audio and video never stop and they dont get out of synch either. when you think Flash playback cant become any heavier, Adobe and Hulu show you otherwise. it makes me wonder if the use of Silverlight could make this less worse?
I remember when TLC was "The Learning Channel". They had all sorts of great stuff on there, including Junkyard Wars and fistfuls of great documentaries. Then they drove Junkyard wars into the ground, brought in a bunch of "Pimp my X" and "Flip this House" shows. Now the channel is dead to me.
A similar thing happened recently to the Discovery Channel. Anyone who thinks that Mythbusters has science content is kidding themselves.
the dumb-fication of TV continues with History Channel increasing its number of reality shows every season. hell, even PBS caved in to reality programming last year (see "Carrier").
however, what worries me even more is the fact that the networks are changing their programming because that's what (the majority of) people at home want to watch. it might not look like a problem now, but if things keep going this way, in a few generations, intellect will be a concept "fantastic" enough to only be depicted in sci-fi stories.
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Win7 has run surprisingly well on my TC1100 TabletPC, despite its Celeron 800Mhz, 1.2Gb RAM and a small 10Gb partition. as a matter of fact, it runs as fast as XP-SP3 (if there's any difference, it's marginal) and. i believe they are taking the netbook market very seriously! and it's very unlikely they will allow (or even need to allow) that class of devices to be sold with XP once Win7 comes out.
the Vista fiasco did teach them a lesson -- even if it happens to be a lesson they will eventually forget.
There are a lot of changes even in the core. Its quite significant actually. Its no WinXP compared to Vista, but its definately comparable to Win2k vs WinXP, or any Mac releases, and then some.
a quick "ver" at command prompt shows:
Win2K = 5.0;
WinXP = 5.1;
not even MS considers XP "significantly" different from 2K.... and i can definitely agree with them as i have -- for the last 7 years -- run each of those OSs in separate machines at home. they are very similar.... just as Vista is very similar to Win7.
I'm half considering really putting it to the test and installing it on my old 256 megs box for shits and giggles...
please, if you do so, come back and share your impressions. i'm more inclined to trust fellow slashdotters than the people of PCMag/PCWorld or the Vista fanbois of other forums.
i'll download Win7 later tonight. let's see if i can lean it up a bit further and run it on my TabletPC. i might get better handwriting recognition.
...or perhaps i'll just grow old, fossilize and become oil while waiting for the Tablet to finish booting.
>> But what about Mojave? Mojave's AWESOME!
>
> No, it's awesome that is AWESOME!
nah. the dude in the commercial said it was "sick".... and it must be true coz he looked smart, was young, sleek and was on the telly!
i wonder how many people have actually visited the Mojave URL shown in that commercial...(?) my guess is that the number is pretty low when compared to the number of people who have downloaded Win7 in the last 2 days. just as Vista, the Mojave commercial was a waste of money. word of mouth is powerful.
Tonight, I will be sleeping with a copy of dBaN by my side.
:-D
has anyone here verified the claims posted on ZDNet a few days ago? according to the writer, Win7 is faster than both Vista and XP. not only that, but he also said Win7 installs faster than both! O.o
i'm inclined to install it, but not because i dislike XP; because i believe Win7 will become a standard and i'll need to service it. so maybe that's time to begin acquaintance with the beast.
i've read the Win7 requirements, but i wonder if i could -- after some tweaking -- run it in my old P3-700Mghz or my old Celeron 900Mhz TabletPC. i dont wanna mess with my main machine.
the irony is that the people who would benefit more from such advancement (the toothless poor who cant bite a beefjerk at the age of 21) will not be able to afford such treatment.
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btw, you dont need so much bandwidth. at least not if you watch on a browser. watch the 296p version of the video.
the "DownloadHelper" plugin for Firefox allows you to download any embedded video as long as the video can be fully buffered to the hard drive. that means it works with YouTube, but it doesnt work with Hulu. depending on the protocol in use, it's possible to use "Orbit Downloader" to save a video stream, but again, it doesnt work with Hulu.
there are a few ways to improve video playback on Hulu's website. depending on your PC, on my P3-700Mhz FX 5500 i need to employ the 3 tricks below. on my Athlon 3000+ GeForce FX 5500, however, i only need to employ the first 2.
1) r-click the video and choose QUALITY > LOW;
2) change the computer's resolution to 800x600;
3) watch the 296p version of the video. just click on the EMBED button and copy the video URL to your address bar; not all videos have an EMBED option, though.
$98 is too much even for Word itself! besides, how great is XML editing in Word 2007? on version 2003 it just looks like a lame-ass text editor. however, if the lawsuit referred to Microsoft's free XML Notepad 2006, i would understand the reason for *some* of the ado. it's a great utility. butit it isnt worth more than $20 either.
strange. my Firefox 3.0.10 got somehow affected by this outage. it just refused to open! it loaded about 30Mb of data to RAM but went nowhere from there. the browser window never appeared. and i tried to re-launch it several times, but for no avail! very odd.... anyone else had problems with it? Opera -- although not able to open Google.com -- opened fine!
Is Firefox tied to Google like E.T. was tied to Elliot?
i never watched videos at ABC.com because the site always required more than i was willing to install (or mess) in my PC. i just decided to give them another try and see what their current requirements for streaming videos are.... and guess what? surprisingly -- they changed it! however -- not surprisingly -- the new requirements are still too restrictive. currently, their videos wont play (and, given their nature, that really isnt any loss) just because i'm a happy user of Win2000.... O.o
TNT is another loser who will eventually take their content to Hulu. on TNT.com the user is required to install some Microsoft DRM plugin crap.... those companies shoot themselves in the foot when they make their sites so picky! with Hulu, it just works! you only need a browser (ANY!) and the Flash plugin. it has never asked me to install anything! btw, YouTube and PBS have got some shows online as well....and they also just work!
the other thing i like about Hulu is their choice of Flash player. it exposes the QUALITY options (HIGH, MEDIUM and Low), which can be the difference between a choppy and a smooth playback. i hope they dont remove it (seems to be the trend)!
what's with that anyway? many websites are doing away with the QUALITY option and just imposing the (more resource-intensive) HIGH setting! geez, sometimes that setting makes Flash just plain unwatchable in my Athlon 3000. why are developers removing an option that is actually useful?!?! it was fine the way it was before when it defaulted to HIGH but let you change it. what's next? are they going to remove the FULLSCREEN option too?
and no, kid! i'm not gonna retire my perfectly functional Atlhon 3000.... or my Pentium 3 700MHz! now get off my lawn!
nothing like an economic meltdown to make Co's recognize the value of their most important asset: their current and potential customers.
Open browser, goto www.hulu.com, watch show. Torrent just can't compete with that.
Torrents cant compete because Hulu takes 100% of the CPU cycles.
i wish TBS and TNT made their streaming service less bureaucratic. last time i checked they required the installation of a Windows Media Player plugin that worked less than perfect on Firefox.
the real question to me is what the heck has happened to Hulu's service for the last month? i used to have great playback even on my Celeron 800Mhz Tablet, but now all i get is dropped frames -- even on my Athlon XP 3000+!
last year i watched all the episodes of "Arrested Development" and was surprised by both the quality of the series (it was new to me) and the quality of the streaming. it only took me the first 60sec of AD's episode 1 to turn me into a big Hulu fan! i even got into the habit of watching movies there afterwards.
the chopped playback doesnt seem to be a bandwidth issue because the audio and video never stop and they dont get out of synch either. when you think Flash playback cant become any heavier, Adobe and Hulu show you otherwise. it makes me wonder if the use of Silverlight could make this less worse?
I remember when TLC was "The Learning Channel". They had all sorts of great stuff on there, including Junkyard Wars and fistfuls of great documentaries. Then they drove Junkyard wars into the ground, brought in a bunch of "Pimp my X" and "Flip this House" shows. Now the channel is dead to me.
A similar thing happened recently to the Discovery Channel. Anyone who thinks that Mythbusters has science content is kidding themselves.
the dumb-fication of TV continues with History Channel increasing its number of reality shows every season. hell, even PBS caved in to reality programming last year (see "Carrier").
however, what worries me even more is the fact that the networks are changing their programming because that's what (the majority of) people at home want to watch. it might not look like a problem now, but if things keep going this way, in a few generations, intellect will be a concept "fantastic" enough to only be depicted in sci-fi stories.
wasnt COOL the original name of C#?
just the other day they (Mozilla) said that bundling does not boost adoption.... now this. was that a decoy or the man was indeed a bozo?
The problem isn't that Windows 7 is based on Vista, of course it is. The point is that all Windows 7 seems to be is Vista 1.1.
no shit! open the Command Prompt on Vista and type "ver". then do the same on Win7.... Win7 is version 6.1... (!) what a joke!
Specially asymmetrical.
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Win7 has run surprisingly well on my TC1100 TabletPC, despite its Celeron 800Mhz, 1.2Gb RAM and a small 10Gb partition. as a matter of fact, it runs as fast as XP-SP3 (if there's any difference, it's marginal) and. i believe they are taking the netbook market very seriously! and it's very unlikely they will allow (or even need to allow) that class of devices to be sold with XP once Win7 comes out.
the Vista fiasco did teach them a lesson -- even if it happens to be a lesson they will eventually forget.
There are a lot of changes even in the core. Its quite significant actually. Its no WinXP compared to Vista, but its definately comparable to Win2k vs WinXP, or any Mac releases, and then some.
a quick "ver" at command prompt shows:
Win2K = 5.0;
WinXP = 5.1;
not even MS considers XP "significantly" different from 2K.... and i can definitely agree with them as i have -- for the last 7 years -- run each of those OSs in separate machines at home. they are very similar.... just as Vista is very similar to Win7.
This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released.
easy to accomplish when you're not creating anything new, but merely patching up the previous release.
Win7 = Vista SP2.
Tablet is Celeron 900Mhz 1.2Gb RAM. if CPU allows, i'll have it done.
Yes! Show to them, mate! viva Monsanto!!!
I'm half considering really putting it to the test and installing it on my old 256 megs box for shits and giggles...
please, if you do so, come back and share your impressions. i'm more inclined to trust fellow slashdotters than the people of PCMag/PCWorld or the Vista fanbois of other forums.
...or perhaps i'll just grow old, fossilize and become oil while waiting for the Tablet to finish booting.
i'll download Win7 later tonight. let's see if i can lean it up a bit further and run it on my TabletPC. i might get better handwriting recognition.
>> But what about Mojave? Mojave's AWESOME!
>
> No, it's awesome that is AWESOME!
nah. the dude in the commercial said it was "sick".... and it must be true coz he looked smart, was young, sleek and was on the telly!
i wonder how many people have actually visited the Mojave URL shown in that commercial...(?) my guess is that the number is pretty low when compared to the number of people who have downloaded Win7 in the last 2 days. just as Vista, the Mojave commercial was a waste of money. word of mouth is powerful.
Tonight, I will be sleeping with a copy of dBaN by my side.
:-D
has anyone here verified the claims posted on ZDNet a few days ago? according to the writer, Win7 is faster than both Vista and XP. not only that, but he also said Win7 installs faster than both! O.o
i'm inclined to install it, but not because i dislike XP; because i believe Win7 will become a standard and i'll need to service it. so maybe that's time to begin acquaintance with the beast.
i've read the Win7 requirements, but i wonder if i could -- after some tweaking -- run it in my old P3-700Mghz or my old Celeron 900Mhz TabletPC. i dont wanna mess with my main machine.
or maybe i just need a lobotomy...
the irony is that the people who would benefit more from such advancement (the toothless poor who cant bite a beefjerk at the age of 21) will not be able to afford such treatment.
Mod parent up.