Hobnox: Slick new player. (May work.)

HobnoxHobnox, an up-and-coming community site for artists, has quite a few assets. One of them is an audio tool WIRED loves. Another one, which I’d like to focus on here, is a video streaming tool.

This is some really interesting piece of software right there. Without knowing anything about the technical background, I have to say I haven’t seen any stream as smooth and quick as that before. You just don’t get any of the usual buffering or anything. (That’s the old player. The new one, we’ll see.) Who saw Hobnox’ live stream from Re:Publica 08 knows what I’m talking about.

So far, sadly there’s no mobile streaming, but folks in the company assured me that’s on their to do list.

Today, I got the chance to check out their new channel player, which is still in beta:

Meet Girls in Hawaii on Hobnox’ Sly-Fi channel. I was lucky enough to attend the Belgian indie rockers’ living room concert you see here, in a Berlin Kreuzberg shared apartment, with another dozen or so folks. So I was quite a happy surprise to discover that video stream right now…*

Just for comparison, here’s a YouTube video of the same event:

What is there to say about the new player? First, the navigation has become more complex, but also more powerful. You’ll still find the occasional jumping button, so it still seems a bit frickle. Also, a right click in the flash interface did produce a little temporary freeze on my computer. However, to be fair, I just installed the new Firefox 3 (and you should, too!), so this might be related.

Although you can embed the player like I did here, it really shows its strenghts in full screen mode – there it looks gorgeous! I’m curious to see where this goes.

Full disclosure: I share office space with Panorama 3000, which is loosely affiliated with Hobnox sister company, so, you know, I kinda like ’em.

*Update: The embed video doesn’t seem to produce the right stream yet. I’ll let it embedded for now to see if it’s going to work soon. Remember, it’s still in internal beta. Hope I didn’t break it…

Update: Video embed seems to be working now. Thanks, David, for the quick feedback!

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