Shooting at Bubbles

I will admit that I wasn’t much of a fan of the whole Adobe AIR platform in the beginning but my recent experiences with Twhirl; client for Twitter, and now with the Adobe Media Player I will be the first to also admit that I may have been hasty in my opinions.

I have been happily using Twhirl for about a week now and for the most part am quite happy with it; but then I’m not the real picky type like Bill the WinExtra guy for software testing is.

So when I saw the post today on TechCrunch that the new Adobe Media Player built on the AIR platform was up for download I figured I would be fair and give it a shot – which can be downloaded here.

Primarily I was interested in the T.V. portion of the player as I like to watch some of my favorite shows on the secondary monitor while I am working away on something else on my main monitor. As it typical with AIR applications installation was a snap and the next thing I knew I was browsing through the available networks currently being carried on the player.

Then I spotted an episode of CSI:NY that I hadn’t watched before so I figured that would be a good test show to watch on the player. I was really surprised at how smoothly and quickly the episode was queued up and was playing. There was none of the typical buffering text with the spinning progress wheel or bar. The moment it has something to start playing it went on it’s merry way and not once did I have it stall out in order to catch up with what was being downloaded.

The only complaint I really had in the beginning was that regardless of how I resized the main player interface the view screen for the show always remained the same size. I will say that the picture quality while not high def; which might be a problem for some folks, was actually pretty good. In fact I’d say it is better than the console TV in the living room – which isn’t saying much I guess considering its age. As well the sound over the headphones was crystal clear with none of the fuzzy sounds you can sometimes get with sound over an internet connection.

Now as I said earlier my one complaint was my inability to resize the view screen itself to any other size than the default one. Then I looked a little closer at the controls and I finally noticed the full screen icon which when selected changed the display to full screen. I will say at this size there was a slight bit of graininess but nothing that anyone short of a video purest would find irritating.

All in all I was quite pleased with the player from the T.V. point of view and while I haven’t tried it with any of the other supported media I can safely say that this will be staying on my system and while not my primary way of watching my favorite shows I will be using it as a good second alternative.