The other night I was browsing the web and somehow stumbled upon GameCenter Live. A friend told me he subscribed recently, and the price for the rest of the season was reasonable. I was still hesitant to buy it because I was unsure about watching games on my PC, and I also run Linux or FreeBSD often so it needed to work OK in their terrible flash player. Somehow I spotted a mention of the PS3. That sounded fantastic — not paying for cable but watching games on my TV? SOLD!

The GameCenter Live for PS3 is $10 if you’re not a PS3 Plus sucker subscriber, so I figured that’s not too bad an entry fee if I only have to pay it once. The download of 18MB only took about 15 minutes which is hilariously slow, but I’m not going to complain if it works.

My experience has been partially satisfying so far. I’ll give you a rundown of the current features:

GOOD

These problems are not only on the PS3 — it’s also mentioned on the Boxee and Roku forums. My googling so far has found instances of people complaining on non-Sony / PS3 forums. Someone must be keeping people quiet about it. I’ve read people mentioning that they’ve heard back from Sony and they claim their engineers don’t have this issue. Others say it’s known and being worked on. My only guess is that the streaming done to the PS3, Boxee, and Roku devices are not the same as the one to the web. It’s probably encoded differently and uses different servers to do the streaming. Either way, it needs to be fixed.

At this point I’d rate the app 2/5 because of how unwatchable the Capitals vs Hurricanes game was last night. If you can handle these issues go ahead and buy it. I’m sure watching the game after it airs will be a decent experience. However, if you want to watch it live you’re going to get frustrated quickly.

I have high hopes for this market. NHL is getting my money and there’s no reason why this format should be treated like a second class citizen. As more things move to the web the situation should improve, but it needs to improve soon because I’m getting impatient….

edit: For anyone who wants to blame the issues on internet connection problems:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode Deutsch:

Episode … in a box!:

Episode: …history of:

Bonus: Wordwang:

You can view Sagan’s whole Cosmos series here.

Hulu Desktop (available for Mac and Windows) seemed like a great idea when I heard about it earlier, so I’ve taken it for a test drive with some original Battlestar Galactica and found it to be better than the experience of watching through the browser.

How so? Firefox on Mac at least is riddled with issues involving Flash, seemingly randomly it slows down and locks up. With Hulu Desktop, the Flash instance is outside of Firefox and runs smoothly. On my Vista 64 desktop as depicted above, Hulu Desktop runs smoothly as well.

On both platforms there are various handy features missing, like an “always on top” option. As this is a beta product I’m not surprised that various features aren’t here, and Hulu says they will listen to customer feedback for fixing them.

There are a lot of people who would rather just download their television shows using Bit Torrent, I think Hulu Desktop is making it much easier to stay legal. You can hook this up with an HDTV and your mac mini or PC for a very good TV watching experience with software that is a billion times more responsive than the software on a Tivo.

Red Dwarf fans should get excited, starting tonight a three-episode series of episodes will be aired in the UK. Back to Earth will presumably be available after airing on sites for pirates.

In other smegging news, Robert Llewellyn (Red Dwarf’s Kryten) has been broadcast a series of short-form interviews while driving. Carpool is available for free on the web and via iTunes.

Says Llewellyn:

The idea started a few years ago when I recorded myself and comedian David Baddiel when he gave me a lift through London. The resulting tape was very funny because we soon forgot the camera was there and just chatted away, revealing far more than we would ever have done in a normal TV situation. That tape now resides in my safe. Far too explicit for public consumption.

I started experimenting in the middle of 2008, recording members of my family on various short trips. I tried different camera positions until I settled on the arrangement I use now. One camera in the rear and two in the front pointing at both passenger and driver.

Many episodes have already been recorded and are up for airing on his site with guests such as TV’s Lt. Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Dave Lister (Craig Charles), and more. Both of those are embedded after the break.

Craig Charles on Llewtube:

Chris Barrie:

Echidnite’s journal – LIKE, EXTERMINATE!.