myMovo: Video Downloading & Transcoding for Mobile Devices

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mymovo.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.mymovo.com/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"myMovo is an innovative new way to search, download and convert videos from the internet to your PC, portable media player (iPod, PSP, Zen, and Zune) , cell phone (Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung) or Pocket PC. myMovo performs a targeted search of top videos sites including YouTube, ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox, mySpaceTV, MTV, Yahoo! and more."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/movo_logo_alpha.jpg" /><br /><br />Taking a brief walk-through of the <a href="http://www.mymovo.com/help/help.html">features on the help page</a>, myMovo looks like an extremely feature-rich application. It's essentially a software tool that allows you to capture remote or local video (streaming or files) and convert it to portable device-friendly formats. Some of the supported devices include the Apple iPod and iPhone, Creative Zen Vision, Pocket PC (and by extension, I'd assume Smartphones), the Microsoft Zune, and others. As with all rich applications, there's so much there it's hard to wrap your brain around it all at once - any myMovo users out there care to share with us what they think of the program?

[hummingbirdhill]

I just spent some time on the myMovo site and I have questions, but I found no link on the site to contact the company (an undesirable point!).

Does anyone in here know any answers?

1) Does myMovo solution remove the need for the Archos plug-ins?
2) Does myMovo contain ads?
3) Does myMovo call home when converting puter files and streaming them to an Archos?
4) An Archos is listed on the myMovo site front page; however, it is not listed on the HELP page which designates different portable devices. So, is Archos truly supported?
5) The website states that myMovo automatically updates; is a way provided for preventing automatic updates? (I prefer to manually schedule them.)

Thank you kindly,
hummingbirdhill

[stoker]

Looks OK,, and a bit awkward when selecting podcasts, or Websearches. Instead of selecting the ones you like, they have a setup that you have to Deselect the ones you don't want, leaving you with the one(s) you do want converted. Otherwise, I can see where this might come in handy as an aggregator for these types of files.. I have transfered the converted files on to my microcard on my Hermes tytn,, now I have to see what the quality was(is). Will hopefully report back to you soon

[onepieceman]

It's extremely rough around the edges. Think alpha.
As the previous poster noted, usability doesn't seem to have been thought about yet. Not only does a web search take forever, it then comes back with lots of stuff you don't want and you're then expected to laboriously go around unclicking the things you don't want. If you wanted to think of a more unusable system, you'd be hard put to find one I think.
Some of the other functions either don't work or are so unintuitive I haven't worked them out.

On the positive side, the idea is good, and with a bit more work and polish, it will be a neat system. So I guess we should watch this space.

[vsolomon]

We came across the posts on this forum and we consider them a very useful feedback - we really appreciate all feedback, positive and negative, that will help us improve our product. Here are some short answers to the questions and comments posted so far.

Archos related:
1. You don't need the Archos plugins in order for myMovo to successfully convert the videos for the device. You can copy the videos directly to the Archos.
2. myMovo contains only a limited number of ads on the website itself, but the videos are ad-free (with the exception of a few of the videos that have embedded ads).
3. We don't capture any details of what files you downloaded or converted on our server. There is a local file that is used to store your activity so you don't download the same file twice. It is in the mymovo\data\&lt;username>\&lt;device> folder. We do keep track of what features our users are using - topsites vs. local import for example, so we can try to tune the application for our users usage patterns.
4. We have updated the help page to reflect Archos - Thanks!
5. myMovo updates itself at startup. myMovo also has a scheduler that allows you to download and convert videos overnight, for example.

Other comments:
6. myMovo email: We have updated the website to make it much more obvious how to contact us. Thanks!
7. We are planning to implement the suggestion for the web search usability problem this week. Thanks again.
8. When you run the websearch, myMovo is running from your computer, not our server as it does when you do topsites. There is alot of processing to extract the video links. We are looking at options that could make the process faster.

We will also keep the FAQ page up-to-date, therefore some of these questions and others to come will definitely have an answer there.

[hummingbirdhill]

Thanks much for the answers, vsolomon. I will plan to visit your site again soon for additional info.

Re: ads
I was wondering if ads are in the myMovo software that is downloaded onto a user's puter?

Re: automatic updates
I cannot use software whose updates I have no control over.

That is too invasive for me, and yes :-) I definitely am a control freak, but I don't want anything occurring in my puter while I am doing other stuff, particularly working with videos--such a huge draw on puter resources.

I am a university instructor and include video analyses in my courses, so the entire process is serious business with me. I capture and edit my own videos, but my Archos 704 is way picky about file types. I consider myMovo a possible solution for that. But I have never and probably will never download videos from the internet to put onto my Archos.

[vsolomon]

1. No ads are downloaded to your computer.
2. Automatic Updates: myMovo doesn't do anything when it's not running - if it's not running, it will never bother you. When you start myMovo, it checks with the server to see if it needs to download any updates - these updates are small and just take a few seconds to download. You can use the scheduler to run myMovo at night, for example - but 5 minutes before it wakes up it displays a warning and allows you to cancel.
Does this address your concern with the auto-update, or is there another aspect to it that we haven't covered?
Thanks,

[vsolomon]

1. No ads are downloaded to your computer.
2. Automatic Updates: myMovo doesn't do anything when it's not running - if it's not running, it will never bother you. When you start myMovo, it checks with the server to see if it needs to download any updates - these updates are small and just take a few seconds to download. You can use the scheduler to run myMovo at night, for example - but 5 minutes before it wakes up it displays a warning and allows you to cancel.
Does this address your concern with the auto-update, or is there another aspect to it that we haven't covered?
Thanks,

[vsolomon]

In response to the feedback on slow response time on our websearch, we have updated our algorithm and reduced the reponse time by 2/3. Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming! If you have myMovo running (M in the task bar) you will need to restart it to get the updates.

We are also planning to improve the UI in the very near future.

[boeinguy2]

I thought that this looked great and was worth giving it a try. I got some podcasts and that worked well.

However two issues. First is the app itself. The longer it runs, the slower my computer gets. I set up to get copies of Jericho episodes from CBS. Each episode is in 5 parts, mmaking a list of about 110 items. If I tried to submit the whole list my system slowed down to such a crawl, I finally had to doa forced shutdown. I tried limiting the list to 6 parts, and the system slowed considerably, but was still able to performa normal shutdown. Once the app is stopped the system contiues to run slowly.

Second issue is that the ability to actuyally get files is limited, at least for TV. Out of the list from Cbs, I got 5 parts. Three from one episode, one each from two other episodes. Nothing else will download, I have tried for three straight days.

My system has a 1.7 Mhz processor, 2 Gigs of ram, tons of free hard drive space, 128 megs of video ram. I am working with a DSL connection that runs at a reasonable rate. Maybe this is not enough to make it work, I do not know.

I like the idea, but it is not working well yet.

[boeinguy2]

So I have continued to work with MyMovo. I have found a few things that work great and that help the issues.

First, Podcasts, Sports, PBS stuff all work great. CBS seems to have the most issues. Hve noit tried ABC.

Second, the speed issue is really processor dependent. I tried doing this on my wife's PC with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor, and it does work better. Still cannot run much in the background but considerably better than my 1.7 Ghz Celeron. (Both have 2 Gigs of RAM and 128 megs of Video. As a matter of fact my wife's PC has shared memory for video.)

Third, I limited the number of files to work on and the whole thing runs faster. Trying to process a list of 110 files (CBS breaks each episode of Jericho into 5 parts) slows everything down considerably, even if there is only one thread being downloaded at a time. Creating a list of only 3 to 5 files speeds things up greatly.

Fourth, If I downloaded 3 or 4 ESPN baseball files then a file from a CBS Jericho episode, the CBS file worked about 80% of the time. If I reversed this, the CBS file never starts. This is far better than the less than 5% of the files that I got trying to access a list of CBS only files. Maybe something in the way MyMovo reads ahead?

I did get a great documentary in four parts from PBS, and some other stuff. This is great, now how to get a better success rate with CBS.