Turn up the Joost

... But when it's bad, it's horrid.

Though Joost has a lot of great things going for it, it also has some quirks. One might normally expect this to occur in a beta, but I'm not sure that these quirks are truly fixable. They seem to be more flaws in the technology than in the software. In a way, this isn't the fault of Joost -- after all, it is the technology, not the software. However, the software is meant to deliver the technology, and some shortcomings can't go unnoticed.

Lag-o-rific

No matter which net connection I was using, whether it be the wired desktop, the excellent built-in wireless of the MacBook or the USB wireless of my HTPC, the Joost connection ended up having lag issues. It was obviously better when I wasn't using my net connection for other things like torrents, but in reality who wants to unclog their tubes just to watch the tube?

If you live with housemates or flatmates, the odds of getting everyone to stop their activity just so you can watch a show are pretty close to zero. Now, over here in the US, we have lacklustre bandwidth to begin with -- but it took almost no other network traffic to begin affecting the service. If you're currently at Uni or have some incredibly beefy connection, this may not be your experience with it. However, from my house (a 1MB cable connection), which I would assume is most likely for common usage, there were several bandwidth related issues.

To me, the concept of something as tech-savvy as television over broadband would have to expect users to actually have other uses for their broadband as well, and this could be accounted for by pre-downloading a fair chunk of the file before playing. Another 10-20 seconds of loading before the video started would go a long way toward preventing problems like the audio going out of sync, which the software routinely did by anywhere from under a second to a three second lag.

Image Quality? What quality?

The other major issue with Joost is the image quality. Or rather, lack thereof. If you'll notice, I haven't talked about it at all until now, and there's good reason -- it's not a positive experience.

But only sometimes. Other times, it looks perfect. What gives? Who knows. I'm not sure if it's dynamically adjusting the content based on allocatable bandwidth or what. What I do know is that image quality bounces around from picture-perfect for a little while to an impressionist painting for another little while, with no visible rhyme or reason.

At first, I thought it was the compression quality -- areas where there were several similar colours would tend to mute out to blobs, losing the highlights and shadows. However, the more I watched, the less true it became. There were instances of stellar video quality, then points of sheer visual misery. After a minute or so, it may switch back to good quality, or perhaps not.

It wasn't even repeatable over the same segment. After a particularly jarring transition, I decided to subjectively test my theory. I watched one episode of "Stella" on Comedy Central on each machine, noting points where the quality went out. Each machine was different, and there weren't visible patterns as to the time intervals -- but they all happened in spans dividable by 30s (give or take a little human error on my part).

The closest guess I have is that the content exists in two qualities -- one that is very low to serve low-bandwidth connections, and one that is very high to allow for faster connections. It seems to download chunks and can switch which version it's using on the fly, depending on where your connection falls. Now, I'm totally and utterly guessing at this -- but it's the only thing I can really come up with to explain it. If there are middle qualities, I must have missed them.

Oddly, what didn't change was the sound quality. Unlike music, where there is sufficient noise at all times to often mask sound quality issues, film has points of silence or quiet speaking. These areas are usually the first to degrade with poor audio compression, but I found myself having no problems with the audio (aside from the sync errors). It would occasionally hiccup, but that was down to the streaming, not the sound quality.