Lean back Internet TV

June 12, 2007 1:46 PM

Chime.TV -- it's a new video hyper-aggregator (like VodPod) by MeFite chime that I've been using since it was in development. It's Wii-compatible and tested and can turn your fave sites into channels (including but not limited to MeFi,Boing Boing, Digg, or Fark). You can automatically watch any YouTube channel as well, or just watch your favorites. I'm personally going to suggest you try out the Net100 channel, which is an aggregate of everbody's top 10 videos. Flash player required
posted by taumeson (26 comments total)

yes, i know chime, btw. that's how i found out about what he was working on. it's too awesome not to share, though.
posted by taumeson at 1:48 PM on June 12, 2007

Ah, see. You shouldn't have mentioned that. Now we'll have to hang you.
posted by puke & cry at 2:04 PM on June 12, 2007

Is it crashing Firefox for anyone else? Works in Opera and IE though.
posted by iconomy at 2:06 PM on June 12, 2007

Autoplay is enemy.
posted by brownpau at 2:08 PM on June 12, 2007

i had my firefox crash on me early on...i just updated to the latest flash player and it worked.
posted by taumeson at 2:13 PM on June 12, 2007

just when I was about to get productive....

(really, I was!)
posted by desjardins at 2:24 PM on June 12, 2007

Huh, the first video it queued up was 70 minutes long. Looks pretty cool though (the video, not the site)

Who needs another meta-aggregator?
posted by delmoi at 2:57 PM on June 12, 2007

Oh yeah, it also crashed firefox for me too.
posted by delmoi at 2:58 PM on June 12, 2007

Oh boy! Actual, useful feedback :)

brownpau: Autoplay is enemy.

I just made it so going directly to http://chime.tv will pause the video. However, if someone sends you a link within the site, it will play directly.

Sorry about the Firefox crashes. I developed the site primarily on FF and it's tested for most browsers/OS however it's the different versions of Flash that are causing the random crashes. If you can tell me the Flash versions (right-click: About Flash), that would be helpful. Upgrading to the latest Flash should really fix the problem and even without upgrading, there are a lot of minor releases of Flash 7 and 8 that work perfectly fine.

delmoi: Who needs another meta-aggregator?

Aggregation is just one of the features. Pick a video in the Documentaries channel, click on the video, then click 'Full Screen.' Sit back and be entertained for hours with minimal effort.

Or try the Indie Music channel. Full-screen, video zoom, and it pretty much looks like TV. Music Hits channel is what MTV used to be. We'd never have built this site if any of the other sites could do this, with this level of usability.

Oh here's my personal random music mix for all of Mefi to mock. I'll keep checking this post for suggestions/issues/marriage-proposals :)
posted by chime at 3:35 PM on June 12, 2007

Wow, that's pretty damn slick.
posted by cortex at 3:35 PM on June 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

I had this site mentioned to me randomly at lunch today, by someone I wouldn't expect to know about it. Synchronicity rules!
posted by WolfDaddy at 3:47 PM on June 12, 2007

Wow, that is some damn nice Flash work! YouTube is just now starting to do some cool stuff sorta like this in some embeds (a scrolling dock of clips thingy), but it pales in comparison to your setup.
posted by blasdelf at 4:02 PM on June 12, 2007

I can't actually be bothered to watch the videos (Wolf Parade being the exception) but the indie channel is a nice mix of music. This works very well (better than 'joost'!)...bookmarked.
posted by Flashman at 4:37 PM on June 12, 2007

heh. i posted this mostly cause of the music channels. but when i sat down and actually looked at what was on the other channels (specifically the comedy and documentary channels) i was impressed.
posted by taumeson at 4:40 PM on June 12, 2007

just. wow!!

I really admire your work on the amazing interface, the videos from url - fetching feature and the bookmarklet, and the ESC - fullscreen mode (even for youtube) is great too! Now if you add XML export for democracyplayer you will rule teh intrnet! :)

Works perfectly in ubuntu firefox?

Some minor notes: embedded dailymotion videos were the only ones not fetched correctly, even directly from a dailymotion site only the first few worked, and they had chunk in the description; all descriptions in the playlist had a timestamp in it and i couldn't change them; it would be great if the bookmarklet-playlists could be saved as a playlist; and maybe revver would be a nice addition, but i understand if you decided you didn't want to support it ;)

Check out my channel: tagr.tv - digital || art || media || hub @ chime.tv
posted by dnial at 4:45 PM on June 12, 2007

Nice! I got the freeze too with FF and Flash 8 / WinXP (just loading the home page was enough to freeze it). I updated to Player 9 and all is well now. Since you're using swfobject anyways, might I suggest you either bump up your required Flash version or maybe turn on ExpressInstall?
posted by whir at 5:10 PM on June 12, 2007

Nice work, chime.

Any particular reason you're using 100% flash? Also: seems to me like the bottom part should be on the side. As it stands, the video can only get a little bit bigger before you lose the bottom section. Put it on the left and move your categories to a drop-down list and you'd be set.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:15 PM on June 12, 2007

Excellent.
posted by meh at 7:08 PM on June 12, 2007

Chime, nice work. I like the intro video, nice clean design. I also like the pick of the day channel automatically queued.

I no longer have a tv, but kinda miss the passive, relaxation side of watching it; This fills that need very well.

one suggestion: dockable/collapsable components. Kinda like iGoogle, it might be cool to let the user drag the different components around rearranging the layout. Have you consider skinning?

Again, well done.
posted by Merik at 7:34 PM on June 12, 2007

Thanks all! As Merik mentioned, there's an intro video now too that my 50% co-conspirator in Chime.TV - Taylor shot with his GF.

dnial: If you upgrade to Flash 9, you get full-screen button on top control bar. Click on the video and you don't need any other software. If Democracy can open a webpage, just add a menu link to Chime.TV. That should work. It's a little iffy to import DailyMotion videos but captions can be changed when you add them to your channel. Revver/Grouper etc. have some proprietary stuff we need to work out before I can include them.

Civil: The site was mostly JS before we decided to go 100% Flash. Click on the video and resize it and you'll see why Flash rocks for an app like this.

Merik: Move the blue splitter bar. Or click on the Playlist tab or the video. There's one skin I made so far but it's a LOT of work to make something like that in Flash. Here's the Wii skin.
posted by chime at 8:14 PM on June 12, 2007

I just have to say that, in happily whiling away some time in the Chime top 100, I saw clip after clip that had become fpp's on Metafilter. Well, I wondered. Was Chime the new Arts & Letters Daily, a meta-source for MeFi? Or perhaps it was a coincidence. Or maybe *cue ominous music* it was some kind of publicity-driven conspiracy uber-stunt. Curious, I set out to catalogue the threads in question, going through the remainder of the top 100 looking for additional match-ups. And boy did I find some.

And then I caught the "via Metafilter" tag to the right of those clips.
Yes. I'm an idiot.

And what Merik said about passive viewing. Very cool.
posted by dreamsign at 6:00 AM on June 13, 2007

Thanks for your answers, chime! I use flash 9, but the linux version doesn't support fullscreen.. anyway i'm happy with almost-fullscreen, and you're right it's nearly the same experience as democracyplayer. But imo still export and also import would be great features, to enable mashups and making use of existing infrastructure, like all the wonderful democracy channels, or other viewing devices and so on..

Any plans on a feature for copying whole searchresults and bookmarklet-lists to a playlist? That would be great! Ok maybe it's only useful if the desciptions could be changed later, and adding them one by one works wonderful anyway.

And one really minor but confusing bug i noticed, and was finally able to reproduce: When i rearrange a video in a playlist, go to another site (no matter if i save the changes or not), and then go back in the browser history (to the temporary url), the rearranged video is duplicated! It's not really duplicated in the playlist, it only seems like that, which confused me and made me delete and re-add the video ;)

Thanks again for this wonderful site! atb!
posted by dnial at 9:06 AM on June 13, 2007

In safari 3.0 just starts jamming through all the videos on it's own. Strange.
posted by xjudson at 9:26 AM on June 13, 2007

Wonderful wonderful wonderful.

It's nice being able to see MeFi single link YouTube videos at work now. Probably short lived as I expect the corporate proxy overlords to be cracking down on this as soon as people find out about it.
posted by daHIFI at 9:53 AM on June 13, 2007

Click on the video and resize it and you'll see why Flash rocks for an app like this.

I did, as I mentioned in my previous post. The problem is that the bottom section essentially makes it impossible to resize the movie to a large percentage of your screen real estate. If you moved it over to the left, you could fit more of the movie on the screen and still keep the other sections.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:23 AM on June 14, 2007

It's 2 weeks since the post but I finally figured out and fixed the Firefox crash. It turns out it was a simple javascript line that was crashing Firefox but only if you have Flash 8. Don't ask me how JS can crash depending on particular versions of Flash. Should be fixed now though.
posted by chime at 12:48 PM on June 26, 2007