From the labs of GE…

Google Video recently added a Movers and Shakers section to their video property. I’ve been playing around with it over the past couple of days and have found it to be a easy and fun way to find new video content.

An interesting feature of Movers and Shakers is the country-based drop-down list allowing you to find out what is moving and shaking in other parts of the world. I haven’t tried it out much, but it seems do a decent job of filtering.

Google has also updated their video uploading feature. It’s a simpler to use now, but it still seems to take forever to get the video live due to their “verification” process. Google really needs to shorten the time it takes to “verify” a video if it really wants to compete with the likes of YouTube (which offers almost immediate upload-to-live video satisfaction).

Having said that, Google Video has gotten a lot better over the past few months. There’s tons and tons of great (and not-so-great) video content available free for viewing.

Well, I finally became a lemming and picked up a 30-gig U2-version of the video iPod at Costco the other day. I primarily purchased the iPod so I can stop burning MP3 CDs just to listen to podcasts in my car. The second part of my no-CD solution was to buy a car stereo (aka, head unit) that would interface with the iPod.

I didn’t really look around that much, but Alpine sure looks like it has a nice system. In addition, Alpine uses a knob for volume control instead of seemingly ubiquitous — and useless — Chiclet-button interface. All you have to do to is buy a $30 optional iPod cable (the KCE-422i), plug it into the back of the head unit and you are good to go. Alpine calls their iPod interface Full Speed. Here’s a link to a Flash-based demo of the system (the demo is a little lame, but gets the point across).

For the head unit I picked a fairly inexpensive one, since I really don’t care about a lot of features… besides the iPod interface obviously. For $200 bucks, I picked up the Alpine CDA-9856 from Crutchfield.

Although I could have saved about $20 going with a random Yahoo! Shopping/Froogle merchant, it just didn’t seem worth it considering Crutchfield’s excellent reputation for service (and you get all the interface cables and stuff for free).

I’ll try to write a little about the set up once I have it installed.