5. Feature Walk-through, Continued

Video

It makes no sense to me that the program records to a DVR-MS file type, yet it will not play the files if they are present in your Video folder - recordings must be in the Recordings folder under TV. This definitely is a show-stopper for people hoping to get this to work with Windows MCE. All other typical file types worked fine: AVI, MPEG I&II, and WMV.

A saving grace of this program is the featured Videos that contain streams from ABC news, The Apprentice, various Yahoo sports feeds, and National Geographic. There were also listings of movies on the web. I found that only the feeds with thumbnails actually worked, and the rest were incompatible. The clips were very small - most under four minutes in length - which makes me wonder if Yahoo is trying to conserve bandwidth.

Music

Yahoo did do a decent job with the concept of this section - now they just need to go through and fix the programming bugs. Music videos worked great; you get a commercial after every two music videos, and you can skip over videos as much as you want. This reminded me of what MTV was like when it actually played music.

Music Videos

I was enjoying this feature until, on the sixth video, the whole program locked up on me despite a clean install of Windows having just been performed. The video streams often get stuck while the audio would continue; this may be a result of my slow DSL, but given the quality of the stream I don't think so.

The program should be able to re-buffer when the video locks up and the music continues to play. I noticed that the commercials, however, always worked fine. I would also suggest a bigger variety of music and genre selection.