The Internet video and image search service GUBA on Monday announced its support of Apple’s Front Row software and iTunes. GUBA is available for $14.95 per month.
GUBA has distinguished itself by focusing its search capabilities on the Usenet, one of the Internet’s oldest parts — a collection of thousands of bulletin boards dedicated to different topics. Among them are thousands of “binary” newsgroups whose users exchange data like multimedia content.
GUBA, a Web-based service that works with the Mac, indexes this content and makes it easier for people to download it by providing thumbnail images, details about the file type, and transcoding for different formats. GUBA already supports the video iPod — users can download video that’s reformatted and resized for video iPod playback.
Bart Myers, GUBA’s vice president of operations, told Macworld that the Usenet contains more than 20,000 videos. “We’ve transcoded all of them to support the video iPod,” he said.
Now GUBA has added support for custom Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feeds that can be viewed in iTunes. So users can tell GUBA what kind of content they’re interested in by defining keyworks, for example, or specifying which newsgroups they’d like to keep an eye on, and GUBA will create a customized RSS feed just for them. That content is then loaded into iTunes automatically, the same way iTunes works with a podcast or video podcast.
“When you do a search return in GUBA, you can click on a button in the GUBA interface and it’ll create a podcast for that search,” said Myers.
Front Row is Apple’s own media center software. Introduced in 2005 with a refresh to the iMac G5 line, it’s since become standard issue on iMacs, Mac minis and MacBook Pro systems. It provides a way for you to navigate the music, videos, photos and movies you have stored on your Mac, and works with a wireless remote control. It also makes it possible to more easily navigate the multimedia contents of your Mac on a connected television.
GUBA’s support for Front Row means that users who download videos or images using GUBA will now be able to watch them without having to move them to a special location to be recognized first. And if you’re using the most recent update to Front Row, you can even view videos and images from GUBA stored on other networked Macs.
“For Macs that support Front Row, we’ve connected the complete lifecycle,” Myers said. Myers likened GUBA paired with Front Row and iTunes RSS support to an on demand video service.
GUBA claims its service is “copyright friendly” and does not index feature films or MP3s, and is fully compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The company has ambitious plans to extend GUBA beyond just cataloging Usenet content. It expects to offer more information about those plans in the coming weeks.