jr conlin's ink stained banana

So, Yahoo! just opened up the beta for the Y!Go TV. If you're curious, it's an application you can run on your computer that turns it into a media center. (ah-HA! i hear you say, isn't there already a program that does that?) Well, yes, actually. There's a bunch. i've tried all of them and found each to be fairly sub-par for some reason. Still, after setting up the mini-pc, i really don't have an excuse not to run stuff like this.

i'm going to compare Y!Go TV with my current top choice, MediaPortal. Microsoft's MCE costs money, so it's out. MythTV sucks. (There, i said it. It's a pretty good PVR, but beyond that it's sorely lacking.)

Sure, it might be a little unfair to compare a just released product with one that's been out for two years, but then again, this is the second mover's advantage.

Y!Go is a fairly slick program. It loads fairly fast, asks pretty simple questions to get started and is still very much a beta.

Once you've logged in, told it where stuff is and let it start up, you get the opening screen:

Fairly self explanatory, eh?

Naturally, arrows and mouse work fine for navigation, so does the mouse wheel if you're not prone to pull out the keyboard.

Since i don't have a TV card in this particular PC, i can't test out the TV PVR bits, but i can test out everything else. It's fairly closely tied with Yahoo! Stuff (surprise). The "Movies" Tab shows you what movies are playing near by.

i presume in case you can't find anything else to watch. The video stream is fairly zippy across a 300k DSL/802.11g connection so no complaints there. Clicking on a theater or feature brings up a description of the movie, trailers, and other bits you might find useful.

You'll also note a "Video" category there. i didn't grab a screen shot, but let's just say that in the era of Google Video and YouTube, it's not up to snuff. It's tied to Y!Video Search and allows you to browse various video searches. Unfortunately, there's no prefetch on these, so your at the mercy of the remote site's upload connection and encoding decisions. For what it's worth, of the three videos i tried to pull, only one played, and it was HORRIBLY choppy. It's a nice idea, but it really needs improvement.

The music page ties in with Launchcast as well as the expected local music players.

All the stations are present, including your personal one if you want, likewise the information and album art are there for you to stare at:

Again, controls are mouseable and although i couldn't use the built in media controls of my keyboard to control playback, other keys worked fine. One nicer bit was that the music continued to play while you dork around with other things, but cuts when you watch a video. A nicer fix would be to pause the music instead so that it picks up after the movie/video/etc. is done.

The flickr integration is probably the most curious bit. Located under pictures, you can display various tag sets from flickr.

Oddly, you can't enter your own tags here. You're stuck with the ones that are pre-entered. The slide show is pretty simple as well. Straight cuts between the images with no transitions. The same is true with viewing images from your local drive or shared from Y!Photos. It's interesting that with the Y!Photos module, you get a mini-keyboard allowing you to enter the username whose public images you'd like to browse.

It's a beta folks, stuff like this is there because it hasn't been fixed yet.

So, how does it fare against MediaPortal? Frankly, right now i'm giving the nod to MediaPortal. Y!Go does not yet provide things like custom skins, a built in browser, RSS news modules, or really many of the other features that MediaPortal currently provides. That said, MediaPortal doesn't have a lot of the Yahoo special features that Y!Go currently offers. Naturally, i expect that to change. Y!Go will have more modules (i know of several very cool ones that are coming out soon) and someone will get around to patching up MediaPortal plugins for various Y!services like Launch.

Not a bad initial effort, though. One of the other VERY interesting things about Y!Go is that this isn't a stand alone product. Y!Go isn't just a media program, it's a platform. Once they release a module for Y!Go TV, it's supposed to be available pretty much anywhere. The whole architecture is built off of web services and public APIs. i don't know if they're planning on opening up Y!Go to allow folks to build their own modules, but i'd be pretty surprised if they didn't.

So, for the 20 or so folks out there with a PC in your living room, here's another media player you probably want to keep an eye on.