New Movie Site

I downloaded it, and gave it a shot. The interface is a bit akward to move in, and I have to force quit a couple of times (couldn't figure out how to get out of full screen mode before I went in.

The few movies I downloaded were h.264 at 628x346 AAC. They have some kind of DRM, as they let you "rent" them for free, for five days. But you can't play them in Quicktime (well you can, but you get no image, just sound). Crashed VLC. The quality of the clips I downloaded weren't that good and I didn't like the lack of control features in the provided viewer. The Jaman Player app states that there is HD material available, but there was no easy way to discover it. There was some interesting material, though, including some Bollywood flicks.

I'm not sure about the download transport, though I would suspect it is another BT backend, as the notes say it is P2P based. It downloaded videos very fast (250KB+) on my 8mbps cable. It has an indicator for upload, also, but little pref config settings, and the documentation is non existent on its environment. It also has a streaming environment, though I didn't try it.

I had to uninstall it, however. Today, Little Snitch disclosed that it was trying to connect somewhere. It asks for admin privs on install, which I gave it (but didn't followup to see what it installed, oops). So when Little Snitch gave me the heads up (and the Jaman program wasn't running), I looked in. It installs a jamdownloader that runs with root privs. No disclosure as to what or why this is needed, and I am not willing to let a beta of this program run anything at root from startup. So bye bye until the program is developed a bit further and there is more trust and disclosure. No trojan horses.

This sort of software reminds me of why I would give a piece of new untrusted software root privileges. It was not smart of me to do so. I would much rather stick with Zudeo at this point, as it is a much more mature offering. To those who don't use Little Snitch, but download and install untrusted software, you might want to look in your Activity Monitor occasionally to see what rogue root processes might be running.

I'm not sure what it was doing, and I did deny the permission, and it didn't seem to affect the program one way or the other once I booted it. My point is, that jaman wasn't running, and some root process was still trying to get out on the internet and do something, and that something was not disclosed anywhere, even in the TOS. Even worse, what the Readme disclosed the jamdownloader as doing was not what the jamdownloader was actually doing. So I still view it as an unacceptable risk.


Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see them flesh out the product, too. It has some interesting content. But it still is in beta, hence some of the issues I refer to.


Care to elaborate? I find Zudea to be built on some very mature technology, hoping to move BT into some postive legal arenas. It's the only tech I've found to consistently saturate my 8mps cable pipe. I've been thinking about using Zudeo technology to build an indy/non profit movie and stock footage distribution network.