Blog

The Zinc Beta 5 release isn’t really an update… it’s more like a metamorphosis. Of course there are some very cool new features, but more importantly Zinc now lives in the cloud- that means you can access your Zinc account over the web, from any Zinc-enabled device. You can see your personal Favorites, your viewing History, or use the new Queue feature wherever you happen to be. In short, Zinc Beta 5 gives you a personalized internet video manager you can get to any time, from anywhere.

So what’s a Zinc-enabled device? The most obvious one is your computer with Zinc installed on it. But that’s only the beginning, because for Beta 5 we’ve created a Zinc TV widget that can be run on HDTVs and other devices powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine. We built the widget because we thought, “Why buy more internet-connected devices, when you can simply make the devices you already have more powerful?” For example, with the Zinc TV widget on your HDTV, you’ll be able to access your personal Zinc Queue on-screen, using your HDTV’s remote control.

The Queue is one of those cool new features mentioned above. It functions like a scratch pad, or a video corral- when you find a video you might want to see at some point, you drop it into your Queue, so it’s easy to find when you’re ready to watch. Imagine sitting down in front of your HDTV, opening your Zinc Queue, and finding videos you know you want to see.

We’ve also changed the Zinc home page by adding Featured sites, and by creating a “Categories” section that segments videos by genre. It’s all an attempt to reduce the amount of time it takes you to start enjoying internet video. Which you might want to do right now by downloading the new Zinc Beta 5!

Let us know what you think… we’re already back to work making the next round of improvements, and your feedback is key.

The best way to experience Zinc, in my opinion, is sitting back on the couch with your legs up, enjoying a nice cold beverage. But most of us don't have media center remote controls, so we have to deal with finicky wireless keyboards and mice or actually get up and walk over to our media PC to change what's playing.

If you own a Wii, all of that can change. With a simple flick of the wrist, you can navigate through Zinc's UI and browse all of your favorite movies and TV shows. How is this possible?

First, a little tech talk: Wiimotes communicate with the Nintendo Wii over bluetooth, a wireless communication protocol. Since bluetooth is an industry standard, many computers have built-in bluetooth receivers. Even if they don't have one built-in, USB bluetooth dongles can be purchased for less than $20. And that's all you really need for this hack.

We have received a number of requests for adding sites to Zinc. Since ZeeVee doesn't have any of our own content (besides our great training videos), we rely on content from other sites. Zinc uses the the RSS standard for syndicating content from third parties like Hulu and ABC. Very shortly we will be deploying a new feature to support third party content so you can add your own site. If you are a web developer or are familiar with RSS, we will shortly be publishing our RSS specification at http://zinc.tv/developers. In the meantime, you can always contact partners at zeevee dot com.

If you aren’t very familiar with RSS, you can still help out. First of all, what makes a good candidate for inclusion in Zinc? It’s pretty basic. A couple of simple rules:

• The site needs good quality video! Zinc is designed for the living room so the higher resolution the better.
• Preferably, the site will have an RSS feed for various shows or episodes.
• Hopefully, the RSS feed will point directly to an embeddable video or video stream. Add the feed to Zinc by entering the URL into the address bar and clicking on the subscribe button. If the feed has embeddable videos, the video should start when you click a tile.
• The RSS feed should have high quality thumbnails. Many sites use smaller thumbnails because the feeds are targeted at traditional feed readers and not Zinc.

What if a site doesn’t have an RSS page? Well, in that case it is a bit tricky. If you have some web development skills, you can sometimes create a feed from a site’s HTML or modify the existing sites RSS feed. Some good tools for working with feeds are Yahoo pipes and feed43.com. In another post we will dig into creating a feed for Zinc.

In any case, keep up the recommendations for sites!

There has been tremendous excitement and feedback on the Beta3 release. The Zinc community has also identified several start up issues when launching Zinc. We have added workarounds for numerous graphics card driver issues, added more logging for memory allocation errors, and found a third party .dll dependency that was causing a load failure if the user did not have the C runtime dll installed. We fixed "white blocks" on cards reporting they supported compression but not actually supporting compression formats, provided a workaround for fullscreen window not reaching correct size (Firefox bug 436772), and fixed middle-clicking on Firefox bookmarks opening in new window instead of new tab.

We have also added two new videos on how to add shows, external RSS feeds, websites and search results to your Favorites section and in Zv HDTV. These very short tutorials will show how easy it is to personalize Zinc.

The patch is available through the standard download pages at http://zinc.tv/zinc/get-zinc and through the update mechanism within Zinc Settings.

As always we want to hear your feedback!

Zinc Beta-3 video browser for the living room gets significant facelift; adds Netflix, CBS and much more content from leading providers.

The new release adds a significant amount of content from existing providers to its on-demand library, as well as the addition of Netflix and CBS to the prior lineup. There are now nearly 15,000 feature length movies and tens of thousands of TV shows that can be watched instantly.

Zinc also has improved navigation and usability features, making it easier and faster to immediately enjoy Internet video. Detailed show descriptions, release dates, ratings and other new information have also been added, so users can make informed decisions about what episodic content to watch, or what new feature-length movie they should select. Users can also declare favorite shows and websites, and be informed when new content is available.

We’ve had some questions about search within Zinc so I wanted to take a minute to explain our search implementation. There are times when you have heard of a movie or TV show, but don’t know where to find it. We implemented a search capability over the “feeds” that carry movies and TV shows. We are not Google, and recognized that the existing search engines at the content providers could generate even more results. They have access to all the content on their site, and their affiliate sites.

At the ZvPresents page, users can enter a search string in the text box at the top and click the search button to get episodes or movies from CBS, ABC, Fox, Hulu, CW, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and from paid sites Amazon and Netflix. If you only want free results; then inside Settings> PC Settings, users can set the preference to ignore results from each of the paid sites. As a convenience to the user, the search results page also includes tabs at the top for YouTube, Hulu, and Google. Clicking those tabs will launch the same search phrase on the search engines at those sites, providing the user with more results. We’ve also provided access to search at the top page from both Hulu and YouTube.

Our search results use show name, episode name and description to rank the results, but currently don’t index actors or directors. As more content providers supply that metadata we will add it to the indexing. Search results are RSS feeds and can be added to favorites. If you’re a big fan of the Simpson’s, use search results to provide you access to an even larger set of free episodes.

Video metadata is the "extra information" available about the content such as genre (comedy, adventure, family...), average viewer rating (three stars, four and a half stars...), actors, director, content advisory (rated PG-13, R, X...) and so on. Showing this information to Zinc users and letting you find things to watch based on it (from many content sources) is one of the coolest features of Zinc.

We get this metadata several ways, but one of the best sources is from the content site's RSS feed. There is a standard (developed by Yahoo!) called Media RSS that defines how to encode some of the metadata.

The next release of Zinc is going to have some exciting enhancements made possible by this metadata. The theory is great, but in practice each site is different and the Media RSS standard is very flexible, so it's a challenge trying to glean this information from the feeds.
We're going to keep pushing the content providers to give us more while we continue to enhance Zinc to make the best use of what it gets.

So that's metadata and why Zinc users should care. When Zinc Beta 3 is released (real soon, we promise) let us know what you think of how we've used it.

Welcome to the ZeeVee blog.

We'll post news, updates and things we think may be generally useful to our community here.

Let's start with an update on what's happening with Zinc (f.k.a. Zviewer). We sent out a survey and we've been gathering feedback on the forum and your input is definitely being incorporated.