New! Watch Low Quality Video on Your HDTV!

Today Engadget reported on a WiFi media player, the DVX-700, from TransTechnology, which supports playback of Google Video. Overall the box has a lot going for it. It has high definition outputs and can stream media in a variety of formats, it also has a hard drive built in, so you can store media, not to mention it’s also got a DVD player as part of the package. Coming in at $237 for the wired version and $264 for the wireless, it’s really a pretty good deal, that is, if you’re in Japan.

My only gripe with the machine isn’t even with the machine itself, really. One of it’s more unique features is that it allows you to browse Google Video, and stream it right to your set. The problem I have is with Google Video (and YouTube). The video quality is terrible. I understand that for them to have all of their videos streaming to millions and millions of viewers at high resolution would cost a lot. But, just watching a video in your browser at something like 300 x 200, looks terrible. Could you possibly imagine what it’s going to look like when it gets stretched to fit onto your HDTV with resolution up to 1920 x 1080?

I guess I just don’t see YouTube the way many millions of people do. There’s tons of people out there content to watch clips of television shows (and sometimes full episodes) at low resolutions filled with jagged lines and video artifacts. I just can’t deal with forcing myself to watch something like that, unless it’s under a few minutes, and entails amateurs doing something stupid, particularly something that gets them hurt. I guess it’s kind of like how I hate listening to MP3 music that’s encoded at low bit rates and sounds tinny.