Often Cloudy

Earlier I had posted my delight in finding a resource for a Joost invite. Here is a follow up post that will cover my first impressions, a few problems I have run into, and some fixes you will probably need to know for a working installation.

For those new to the term ‘Joost’, all you really need to know is that its basically on-demand television that streams over your internet connection. The service is currently free and also in the beta development stage where they are still working on bugs.

Installation Issues

The first issue I had to tackle was my router needed some ports opened up. This was relatively simple and through some searching on the Joost site I found the ports I needed. Unfortunately not much mention of this task occurred during the software installation. From the Joost website:

Opening ports required by Joost: If you know that your ISP allows you to use UDP but still can’t see any video, you’ll need to check that your firewall or router is configured to allow access by Joost application. In particular, make sure that the following are enabled:

• TCP access, outbound, to ports 80, 443 and 5223.
• UDP access, outbound, to port 33333.
• If you have a public IP address and UDP inbound on port 33333 is unfiltered, the client may use UDP on port 33333 inbound.
• If you want to chat from within Joost, you’ll also need to enable inbound TCP access to port 5223.

After adding the ports they requested I was still having problems. Some searching on the support forums revealed that adding the following ports might help:

• tcp –dport 33333
• udp –dport 4166

Once I had all the ports open I continued getting the error below.

tvprunner.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

It seems many others ran across this problem when they updated to the latest version (Build 10, “Now for Friends” edition). Another search on the support forums lead me to find a problem with some .ocx files in the WIN/System32 directory. I took a gamble and followed another users instructions:

Removed these files from system32 folder:

• 2KG2D6GN.ocx
• E2DGHAFK.ocx
• GHP6JVUB.ocx
• KJIXEDQK.ocx
• S239DIEF.ocx

I just wanted to see if the files actually existed and sure enough there they were. These were ActiveX control files and I went ahead and removed them. Follow this advice at your own risk. For me it was the only way to get the program to completely launch. Dealing with problems like this is just one of the disadvantages of being in a beta.

Running Joost

Once I had it running the program ran me through a quick user registration and I was up and running. I began browsing channels and looking at programs. So far I have watched all of the Stella episodes they have on the Comedy Central channel, some music videos, and a couple of documentaries.

The video quality isn’t exactly great, although I believe a large portion of this depends on your connection speed. After streaming for a while and not surfing the web at the same time, the quality seemed to improve. The time of day and number of users connected to Joost could also have an effect on stream quality.

What makes Joost free is the limited amount of advertising they run during a video feed. In a typical 30 min. show I ran across three “commercial breaks”. These breaks only consist of a commercial for one product, often under 30 seconds (just try to avoid the chevrolet commercial if you can). On a given show, you will see the same commercial three times, on the next show it will be a different commercial from the pool.

The music video channel handles commercials differently. At the end of each video they have a splash ad that says this content brought to you by “Blah Blah” and has a picture of the product. A ten second commercial. This would be nice if it worked as intended. Unfortunately during my viewing I somehow became trapped in an endless loop of the splash ads. I was so locked in that I had to exit the channel to escape the short ads. Aside from installation issues, that is really the only bug I have encountered in program use.

To sign up for Joost you will need an invite from someone who is currently in the beta. This is supposed to change sometime at the end of May. If you would like an invite now, leave an email address in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Update: Joost just announced $45 million in new funding that will certainly bring on additional content!

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