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So the Venice Project has become Joost, for those of you who are interested.

I’ve been feeding back to the Venice Project for a few weeks now (I got onto the beta about a week before Christmas 2006) about the fact that it doesn’t work on Vista.

Various other beta testers have highlighted this too and a temporary fix was put together by one particularly astute person. Excellent job. All I can say is that the instructions are easy to follow if you’re familiar with user permissions for files in Windows.

I’ve tried this and it does indeed get Joost to run. The error dialogue box does still appear but atleast the software works.

Joost works on the principle of peer-to-peer and has been devised by the brains behind Skype.

I immediately leapt in to the ‘World’s Strongest Man 2005′ video channel as seeing grown men lifting Altas spheres makes me laugh. Unfortauntely there was no-one on the associated chat channel so I couldn’t talk away to anyone about lifting small cars.

I suppose I’ll just have to await the next series whereby someone from Poland doesn’t win the title.

The video quality on my 19″ Sony screen was remarkably good (much better than the screen shots elude to) and the video started in a matter of second after I clicked on it in the channel finder. Clearly this kind of performance is essential when we live in a world when streaming content from a Windows Media Center to an Xbox is so straightfroward to do and very performant. I will watch Ashleigh’s attempts to build an Easynews interface into Media Center will great interest.

There’s a useful insight into what current testers would like Joost to do in the Suggestions Forum on the Joost website. One that will prove interesting to monitor is the suggestion to have Joost plug into Windows Media Center.

My gut feel for the ‘Venice Project that has become Joost’ is that it’s an interesting concept. I think the beta programme will weed out a lot of issues (just quitting from the thing was driving me nuts) but this is becoming an extremely crowded marketplace now what with Windows Media Center and Apple TV available. Much of what is available on Joost is on the likes of Easynews and BitTorrent and you can obtain it at much better quality. Joost will appeal to those people who don’t want to deal with transcoding, PAR files, etc.

The $50 Billion dollar question is though will I be able to get episodes of Lost on it as they come out on ABC in the US? If I can then I might well fall in love with this piece of software. Otherwise I’ll probably uninstall it just after 7th February.