Your Movie Wish Is Jinni’s Command

For those of you still not satisfied with the current crop of movie recommendation services, you’ll soon have another option available to you. Jinni’s new interactive movie rating website is trying to do for movies, what Pandora has done for music. Although the site doesn’t stream any of the films that they recommend, but provides convenient links to places where you can find the films online (Netflix, Blockbuster, Hulu, etc.) Apparently, the company has been live for a few months now, but I just discovered them after catching a review of the service on Read Write Web. Last week, I signed up for the private Jinni beta and have been pretty impressed so far.

Jinni includes reviews, photos and even trailers for each film in their database, but their movie filtering software is the real bread and butter. Most of the content you’ll find on their movie description pages is pretty much available on any of the other movie sites, but their “movie genome” information is exclusive. Through a process of human and computer intervention, they’ve categorized every film in their library using information from the movie’s plot, mood, genre, time period, critic reviews, story type, and attitudes. Viewers are then able to filter their search results by using these definitions.

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New Codec Support in Windows 7

An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums. As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above screengrab shows, Microsoft is breaking with tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle. Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite … Read more

ZNF ‘Round The Web

Leaving comments across the blogosphere… Senate OKs DTV Delay, Still Needs Money for Coupons While I don’t favor a delay and have said repeatedly the entire transition has been a cluster on multiple levels, local affiliates being permitted to flip the switch prior to to June 12th might make things even more chaotic. I’m sure … Read more

ZNF ‘Round The Web

Leaving comments across the blogosphere… Control TiVo With Your iPhone for $3 I’m sorry, but a TiVo touchscreen remote is so much less efficient than the Glo remote. I don’t want to look down to change channels. Nor do I want to keep my iPhone on for a two hour Lost episode. I also prefer … Read more

Digital Media Bytes

A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our other blogs: Broadband Issues for President Obama The historic swearing-in of President Barak Obama has taken place, and now it’s time for the real work to begin. Alongside war and a tumbling economy, several broadband issues face President Obama in both the short and long term. There’s … Read more

Digital Media Bytes: Last100 Edition

A periodic roundup of relevant news… from our friends at Last100: 10 feet away: YouTube lands on PS3 and Wii Perhaps taking a leaf out of the BBC iPlayer’s book, Google-owned YouTube have launched a version of the video sharing site designed specifically for viewing on a television. DivX 7 adds support for Blu-ray rips DivX … Read more

Touching Windows Media Center 7

EngadgetHD had the best Windows 7 Media Center scoop from CES. They shot a great video of the Media Center 7 used with a touchscreen UI. While I’m not sure I would want my family reaching out and touching my LCD or plasma TV to change the channel,  there’s no denying the fact that this … Read more

DivX 7 Arrives: H.264, MKV, AAC Support

With all of the CES news last week, some media/electronics coverage was overshadowed. Such as the update of popular AV compression and playback software DivX version 7. DivX 7 introduces support for full HD H.264 videos. The software comes in two forms, a freeware edition with video playback support and a $20 version providing additional … Read more