Saturday, October 22, 2005

What's Lame.

Well, Yast has just informed me that lame is NOT an MP3 player. It's an educational tool for teaching people how to make MP3s.

That's really beside the point. 'Cuz the new I-Tunes TV show feature IS lame. Really, really lame.

Consider this:

I've become a big fan of the new show Lost. Before season two came out, I caught up on season one thanks to Bittorrent. Sure, downloads can sometimes take a whole day, but I'm pretty satisfied with Bram's little invention.

Point is, I was all caught up by the time of the season premier. Sure, I saw it about 18 hours after the rest of the folks who saw it on TV did, but, for being in Italy, only a 1 day delay is more than acceptable. And usually the audio and video are of good to superior quality, even watching it in full screen mode.

So, I-Tunes now sells episodes of Lost about a day after the episode airs. I thought I'd give it a shot.

Well, let me tell you, Pat, I-Tunes' performance was much lamer than the episode, no matter how much you think it sucked.

Sure, it downloaded in a few minutes, as opposed to a few hours with Bittorrent. But that's about the ONLY good thing about it. The video quality was HORRIBLE (unless of course you watch it in Quicktime's thumbnail-size "normal" window). Oh, and since I refuse to pay for Quicktime, I couldn't watch it fullscreen.

So, I must admit, I feel just a little bit ripped off by Steve Jobs.

Now back to figuring out how to listen to MP3s on SUSE 10.