How To: watch a film (Reservoir Dogs?), TV show (Lost? Heroes?) or music video (Radiohead?) on Joox : Tech Digest

Ever since Stuart wrote about Joox last month, I've been jonesing to try the online video-streaming site out for myself, so during my lunch break today I skived and watched half a Lost episode. That's right, I didn't have to mess around with paying and downloading via iTunes, or illegally downloading films via Bittorrent and wait overnight for one measly 45-minute long episode - nope, I streamed it as I watched it, direct from the website. How did I do this? Read on below the jump for a how-to guide on using Joox, officially labelled My New Favourite Play-Thing On The Internet This Month...

1.) First, fire up a browser and go to www.joox.net. On the right side of the site, you have eleven choices of viewing, so decide exactly what it is you want to watch, and click on your chosen viewing. If it's a TV show, you may need to choose between series and then episodes - for instance, almost every episode of Lost is on Joox!

2.) Joox allows you to view the films via Div-X, so if you haven't already downloaded the program, you'll have to do so now. Simply click in the box where the plug-in is advertised, and you'll be whisked off to the Div-X site - installation only takes two minutes or so. Once you've downloaded the program, you're home free! Simply refresh your page, and the video will start to buffer.

Joox

3.) Once the video has streamed enough (I'd leave it at 20% complete before you press play, otherwise if your internet connection is slow, I'd recommend waiting until it had fully completed first), you can press play, and voila! There's your episode of Lost. You can choose to watch it within the browser, or press the 'expand' button on the toolbar of the video to view it full-screen.

It really is as simple as that. What's on offer? Well, here are my top recommendations...

Anime: Afro Samurai, Bleach, Ghost In The Shell, Naruto.
Bollywood: erm...anyone recommend any? I'm fairly ignorant here I'm 'fraid.
Cartoons: Clerks, Futurama, Pingu, South Park, The Simpsons
Comedy (stand-up / sketches): Chris Rock, Dane Cook, Dave Chappelle
Documentaries: BBC's Planet Earth, Chomsky and the Media, The Corporation
Foreign movies with subtitles: My Neighbour Totoro, Porco Rosso, The Jacket
Foreign or dubbed movies: Final Fantasy, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs
Movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Human Traffic, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Music videos: Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage', Manic Street Preachers 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough', Rage Against The Machine 'People of the Sun'
Sport: choose between boxing, soccer or wrestling
TV shows: Entourage, Heroes, Japanorama, Peep Show, Mighty Boosh, X-Files

Kat's dodgy recommendation: Ace of Base's 'All That She Wants'. Ahh, the memories...

As Stuart discussed in his article about Joox, the actually legality of the site is yet to be determined, however I can imagine that one day soon the site may be YouTube'd - ie, made to take down any copyrighted material, which sadly is the whole content of the site. So, make the most of it whilst it's there, sunshine.

Joox