Watching Joost on your TV with a remote control

Now that Joost is actually signing deals to get content you might actually want to watch from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, you might be wondering how to watch the computer-based internet television platform on your television set.

While Joost really does make watching online videos a bit more like watching TV and a bit less like surfing the web, you still pretty much need to use a keyboard to navigate. And that means even if you run a line from the video-out port on your computer or graphics card to your TV, it's no easy feat to watch Joost on the big screen.

Luckily, you can map the keyboard shortcuts to most PC remote controls. And you can even add an icon to your Windows Media Center Program Library that will start and stop Joost. Here are a few tips:First, let's go ahead and add a Joost icon to your Windows Media Center program library. Lucky for us, someone's written up a nifty little program and added it to the Joost forums. It adds an icon to your program library to start Joost, and another to stop it, which is a little funny, since one side effect of this program is that it will stop Windows Media Center when you load Joost. Most likely, when you exit Joost, you'll have to reopen Windows Media Center again.

Next, you'll want to program your remote control to control Joost. If you already know how to map the buttons on your remote, you might just want to take a look at Joost's list of keyboard shortcuts by scrolling to the bottom of the release notes. Note, you'll only be able to access this page if you already have a Joost account and login.

If you happen to have a Hauppauge remote control (the kind that come with Hauppauge TV tuner cards), you can find a key for mapping your 34 button remote here. Or if you have a Snapstream Firefly remote (from the makers of BeyondTV), you can find instructions for creating a Firefly XML file with Joost settings here.

Configuring your remote might be a little tricky. For example, with the Firefly remote, I haven't been able to figure out how to map a button to the "<" key, which is the key needed to bring up a channel list. So for flipping channels, I have to resort to using the Firefly remote's "mouse mode," which lets me control a cursor on the screen.