Live Mesh Media Viewer

Microsoft’s synchronization platform in the Cloud is evolving with new features and bug fixes and has now reached version 0.9.3821.962 (Live Mesh for Mac) and 0.9.3424.31 (Live Desktop). One addition that Live Mesh testers have been able to play with since March 4, 2009, is the new Media Viewer on the Live Desktop. At this point in time, Live Mesh continues to be in Beta stage, and, in this regard, the Online Media Viewer might be somewhat disappointing because of its limited set of features. However, moving forward, Microsoft is bound to introduce additional functionalities to the Media Viewer and enhance the user experience.

“With this, you can open rich media files – like photos and videos – right from your desktop found at mesh.com. The Silverlight player has built-in controls for pausing videos and making them go full screen, but it doesn’t yet include any advanced seek options like rewind, fast forward, or a slider. However, it does have two arrows – one on each side – which will take you to either the next or the previous video in your Live Mesh folder,” Microsoft’s Sarah Perez revealed.

The fact of the matter is that the Online Media Viewer in Live Mesh Beta is nothing short of rudimentary at this point in time. However, the feature allows end-users to break even more of the roots that are keeping them anchored to the desktop, and in this sense it is a laudable initiative from Microsoft. One that ultimately enriches the Live Mesh capabilities, allowing users not only to store their content in the Cloud, but also to access media from any device.

“Also included in this update was an improvement to the way Live Mesh News displays the timestamp. It now displays the date as well as time for all news items, even old ones. Other fixes include: improved the Live Desktop quota calculation; optimized MOE CPU/memory use; fixed Mac client startup errors that caused client to shut down shortly after launching; Mac passwords containing extended characters now work properly; device status (online/offline) now properly displayed on the Live Desktop, in the notifier, and in the Mesh bar; and news now correctly displays the year,” Perez added.