I recently discovered online film scene, though, and it's fantastic. Short films, up to about 20mins in length, just posted online for all to download. Many of them are better than professionally produced, high-budget TV shows that stream so liberally to your TV box. Every one is a labor of love, so even when production values aren't high you know that someone has poured themselves into product, which brings satisfaction beyond that of watching some stale TV show now into it's 19th series and just churning out money makers.

Cartoons were my first port of call. It's been a long time since I've been awake and free early enough in morning to watch some animated entertainment (and besides that, cartoons on TV now are largely trash). A friend introduced me to my first online cartoon, enormously popular and hilarious Homestar Runner (http://www.homestarrunner.com). This site is fantastic. There are longish cartoons and games, with new ones being added every now and then, but main reason to visit and continue to return is a lovably vicious character named Strong Bad. The creators of web site answer roughly one email a week using this character that basically insults people in most hilarious ways possible. It's all quite family-friendly and is more than worth a bookmark.

So with that, lets dive right in. For my money there are are only 3 choices - Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Players - but I'll talk a little about RealPlayer 10 as well. All of these applications share baseline features - playing various media files, cataloging digital media, etc. We'll focus on things about them that are different.

Back in day, we had Winamp, and it was good. Unfortunately the original Nullsoft team has all moved on and instead of hacker cred that Winamp used to have back when Justin Frankel et all were on job it is now just another corporate media player with a hazy future.

Winamp lost a lot of momentum that it had when it released a ( very ) bad Winamp3 - but with release of Winamp5 they seem to be back on track - it is useable, responsive, and has a lot of plugins and skins created for it.

The major problem is that for all of it's features it is not much, if any, better then two dominant media players that are tied to successful music stores iTunes and WMP. Additionally you have to pay $14.95 to get pro version that add features that iTunes and WMP include for free. One of bonuses of using Winamp is ability to tune into all of cool shoutcast radio stations.

iTunes is, of course, is digital jukebox front end for iPod and iTunes music store from apple computer. The iTunes music store was first to get pay for digital music downloads right and it still has largest legal downloadable catalog on net giving iTunes jukebox a hefty advantage.