4oD: First impressions

4oD is hot and willing, all naked and beta for your lust-filled gaze.


I was very excited about 4oD. It's new, it's bold and it's the future of media, right there in downloadable form. So, did it match up to my dreams?

Kinda, I guess.

The installer is small and intuitive, though one has to try hard to mess up an installer. Even so, so far, so happy.

The interface is pretty okay. It was a little slow and wasn't entierly wonderous, but does the job and looks pretty. Hopefully it will become a little more function-filled in time.

The problems kicked in when I noticed that Whose Line is it Anyway? was available! Not just that, but two of the British series, which make much better viewing than the American one, I think. Sadly however, after paying my 99p, it just plain old refused to download. I don't know why and I don't know what I can do to make it go: there wasn't any informations given.

As I weapt the kind of tears that only come from a lack of Whose Line?, I had a flick through the free offerings. Frankly, they were token at best. Starkey's Monarchy is going to appeal to some, sure, but beyond that Trigger Happy was all that really caught my eye as a "big name" programme. Eventually I settled on Hardeep Does, a very 'meh' show by a comedian who wants to do comedy and thinking, but doesn't quite make the jump across. However, it did download ludicrously fast. 175mb in less than 5 minutes, was impressive. And the quality looks broadcast.

This was where the second problem kicked in: you can only watch the show in the 4oD player which is shockingly bad. There is no way to chose a size manually. Worse, in a quick skip around the obvious places on my computer I just couldn't find the files to watch in software of my choice. I sincerely hope this is changed for the final release.

Overall this is an extremely welcome thing. A couple of minor things, but I'm still very happy.


edit: Just finnished Hardeep Does and it was crazy frustrating. I just wnated to sit down with the man and say where he went wrong. Which I guess is good thinking-making.


And another thing: 40D opens external pages in I.E., instead of your default. Which is absurdly irritating and exactly the kind of thing that makes me stop using software.