Really, it’s good that Universal has embedding disabled. If I could put it in this post, you’d be able to watch it. It might even get stuck in your head. And then, perhaps, you could buy the song on iTunes or Amazon via the link to purchase it that’s over the video. Instead, I won’t, because I can’t. Universal will keep protecting its property by slowly killing it, and their unembeddable video will continue to kill their radio stars.

Maybe in 30 more years they’ll have figured out how to survive on the internet, but at that point there will probably be something else that’s come along that will take them a decade to figure out. [YouTube]

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

Although Sony told us in advance that the service was going live last night, it still wasn’t available when I checked at 11pm, so they must have left it to te very last minute to push it live. It’s a 23MB free download from the Playstation Store, although that small footprint belies the time it takes to setup.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, you need to agree to the EULA and choose whether to receive email updates on the service. Then it sets itself up, installing various components and doing God knows what else for about five minutes before you can start watching your favourite music videos.

From the homepage, navigation is a little confusing. There’s a whole heap of predetermined playlists, like the Top 10, best rock, sexiest and “star cameo” playlists. If you don’t actually want to listen to any of those, you need to press the circle button to enter the menu. There you’re given the option of searching for songs, artists or genres and creating or listening to playlists.

The search feature is probably the first area that VidZone struggles. Typing in the name of your desired artist is slo-ow. rather than using the PS3’s usual on screen keyboard, you have to manually scroll through each letter, and it’s not responsive at all. If you’re trying to type in a name with a lot of letters around the middle of the alphabet, like Bon Jovi for example, you’ll need a couple of minutes.

On the upside, the sheer number of songs and artists is impressive. It’s not just restricted to the latest music either – there are tracks from the likes of James Brown as well. And John Mayer is there too.

The videos themselves look and sound good, except for one little problem – they’re all restricted to 4:3 ratio, meaning your big ass 16:9 TV has two black bars down the sides. Even clips that are 16:9 in nature, like The Pretender by the Foo Fighters is restricted to 4:3, which means you have black bars all around the clip. Hopefully this is something Sony fixes post-haste, because not being able to view clips full screen is a huge disappointment.

As we saw from the screenshots yesterday, the ads are unobtrusive and varied, although at the moment a lot of the ads look to be directly imported from the UK, considering the pound signs everywhere. I’m sure that’s just a launch phase thing though – as the service kicks off we’ll probably see a lot more localised ads.

On the whole, VidZone is pretty impressive. It’s not something you’ll use all the time, but if you’re having a party or just want to sit around watching sexy videoclips, it’s a great solution. And if it is a precursor to a full VOD service from Sony like we hope, then you can colour me excited.

[VidZone on Giz]

The service is ad supported, and from the screenshots Sony sent through it looks like the ads are fairly unobtrusive. They reckon that there’s three weeks of solid music playback from launch, although for an old-school rocker like me, the quality of the music on offer is still open to debate. And of course, there’s still no mention of when we’ll get movies or TV shows, although that’s to be expected considering the fact that they’re only just launching this service.

We’re not sure what time tonight the service will switch on, but feel free to tell us what you think of it once it’s live.

What will really be crucial for Sony’s success in this space though will be an arrangement with ISPs, just like Microsoft has with iiNet, so the ad-supported free service doesn’t end up costing PS3 owners in bandwidth. We’ll just have to wait and see if anyone’s prepared to jump on that opportunity when the service launches in the coming months.

[VidZone]

Music videos are made to appeal to non-geek masses, but some were made by some bigtime nerds—while others are just are unmistakeably nerdy. You already know where we’re going with this, so let’s just move:

I had to kick off this otherwise unordered list with the all-time geekiest song, Mr. Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science,” a comic video that started the whole ball rolling.

The Beastie Boys, nerdy at heart, do battle with a giant boxy robot over Tokyo. Exactly.

Michael Jackson’s bizarre stop-motion video from that period after he was huge but before he was really really creepy.

Ah Spike Jonze, you are the prince of Geek Video. May your army of bad dancers never want for recruits.

Speaking of Spike, here’s an overly elaborate video of a smooth song. How’d they do that? ACTING! No, wait, SHOOTING IN REVERSE WITH NO CUTS!

Before he became a Hobbit, Peter Gabriel was a video pioneer, experimenting with a lot of at times kinky stop-motion photography. “Sledgehammer” is the epitome of the style.

There’s stop motion, and then there’s Lego stop motion, which Michel Gondry used to pretty up the White Stripes.

I may be too old to consider Power Rangers nostalgia, but there’s definitely fun to be had with the Bag Raiders (Adrian says he wants more Zords).

Weird Al speaks nerd. So many gems to choose from, but “White & Nerdy” really sums it up.

Saving the best for last, here’s the otherwise extra-classy Dire Straits cheesing it up bigtime—with real (primitive) computer animation!

If you can’t get those MTV embeds, here’s Weird Al and Dire Straits on YouTube, sadly not available for embedding.

And if you’ve got your own favourite geek videos, embed them below. That’s what enhanced comments are all about!

It doesn’t look like any Warner videos have been pulled down yet, so maybe there’s still hope for the arrangement. But you have to wonder why Warner would expect a massive return from YouTube videos anyway… Is there a single person who pays attention to ads around a YouTube music video? I’d have thought it would be better to look at it as a way of growing your band’s exposure, rather than a revenue raiser. But of course, I’m just a cynical tech blogger, not a representative from a music label, so I’ll just sit back and watch as many Muse and RHCP clips on YouTube today as I can in case tomorrow sees them all disappear…

[Reuters]

There’s patience, and then there’s the patience. Like shooting a 4:15 music video using nothing but the 45,000 images you captured with a Nikon D200 DSLR camera.

That’s exactly what director Cesar Kuriyama did for the band Fat City Reprise. The video is, shall we say, quirky, with a wacky little plush doll engaging in what appears to be some kind of lover’s tryst with a young blond girl in a bed. And a field.

The 45,000 images, 14 months of work and $US3,000 it cost to create the video was actually an ingenious workaround for photographers who want to make high-quality videos at low cost, noted Wired in an interview with the director this week. Previously, directors were stuck with recording using the low-quality video features of their DSLR rigs; or with bulky high-end movie cameras that were expensive even when rented for a shoot.

But cameras like the Nikon D200, or comparable rigs from Canon, et al, are changing the way directors think about shooting video today. As Wired notes, the Canon 5D Mark II is fully capable of 1080p video, as for the tidy price of about $US2,700. Or, go the Kuriyama route, and shoot the whole damn thing with the actors moving in slow motion, while your director of photography shoots them at four images per second. The result, as you can see, is the video above. [Cesar Kuriyama via Wired]

1. Get a company’s flagship phone
I understand that Scooter Smiff’s audience is probably as young as he is and doesn’t buy many massive smartphones, but if you’ve got to shill for a BlackBerry, hope it’s not the Pearl Flip. Matt—notably a gadget blogger, not a rapper—said it was kind of uncool, looked inconsistent, and even called it a “fatass”. Next time beg for a Storm, or at least a Bold.

2. Don’t include an incredibly boring product
So imagine you’re a tween, just browsing YouTube, and you notice Scooter Smiff’s teacher grading (UPDATE: fabricating, more like. Scandal!) his paper on an HP Touchsmart PC, with her fingers. This is the least exciting thing you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t even make sense in context—it’s like HP just edited a few seconds of their press materials into the video. Same goes for the inexplicable printer cameo.

3. Refrain from using devices that make you look even more like a child
Riding a miniaturised Cadillac Escalade will not help you look older, and will probably make those few people who actually have a toy like that return it as fast as they can drive it back to Sotheby’s. See also: catcalling obviously older girls.

This song might not be as embarrassing as the iPhone’s prominent role in a certain inauspiciously-named (and NSFW) track from earlier this year, but a difference here, and an important one, is that HP and BlackBerry actually wished this on themselves. [CrackBerry]