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Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Lucas Gonze Speaketh the Truth About Web Video

For reasons that shall forever remain unknowable, audio/video developers think that users want doodads and chrome, whereas what users really want is for the damn song to come out of the speakers without having to mess around with plugins and codecs. The song is the point, not the software.

From here.

Why? I'll tell you why. They're all annoying. Plus they don't test their apps on anything other than a local machine, so they have no idea how hard it is to load a video. The most extreme example is Real Player, which works about 70% of the time. That's just unacceptable. Windows Media Player works more often than not, but it's limited to a few files, and will show you tons of crap that you don't need unless you tweak the hell out of it. VLC was described to me as 'user-hostile', but I actually love it. If/when they start supporting XSPF, that could be interesting.

Hey, video developers, here's an idea: put the ads that we all know are driving the stupidity of your software in the content itself. And don't make it too obtrusive. Otherwise people will keep trying to figure out ways to watch the video without your crummy proprietary player, and then nobody sees the message from the person who pays for the content. Or you could charge for it. That might not work (I think iTunes isn't going to sell a lot of videos at $1.99 once the novelty wears off, but I could be wrong). Straight to DVD could be the way of the future, and guess what? I can play that on my TV without mucking around with crap software.

'Tis here, but yet confused...

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