The Kodak Theatre HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a mouse on a TV screen.

This week I tested the Kodak Theatre HD Player, the photo-centric company’s attempt to snag valuable real estate in the living room. This small, black box pulls photos and videos from computers around the house and displays them on an HDTV. It also enables the sending and receiving of photos via Kodak Gallery, and connects to Web-based photos stored on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, .Mac and others. Podcasts, Internet Radio and updates from news feeds, weather forecasts and stock quotes are also accessible using the HD Player. And it has a terrifically simple motion-sensing remote that works like using a mouse on a TV screen.

But the HD Player isn’t all smiles. Its $299 price doesn’t include any built-in storage for keeping content directly on the device. It currently has no way of accessing HD movies or television shows, nor will it work with Macs. In comparison, Apple’s (AAPL) $229 Apple TV has 40 gigabytes of storage, can access HD television shows and movies via the iTunes Store, and works with Macs and Windows PCs. This is important because as budgets tighten in the current economy, gadgets have to prove their value and versatility more than ever.

After using the Kodak Theatre HD Player with Windows XP and Vista machines over the past week, I can conclude that this device’s interface shines in its simplicity and is a lot of fun to use. Kodak teamed with Hillcrest Labs to make the player’s motion-sensitive remote and corresponding software, which includes satisfying extra features like images that automatically magnify when the remote control’s cursor points at them and icons that make chirping sounds when selected. The remote itself is shaped to rest comfortably in a hand and has three simple buttons and a scroll wheel.

Quick-access memory-card slots for six types of memory cards appear on the box’s front, and two USB ports can connect to digital cameras or USB storage devices.

Currently, the player’s software works directly with Flickr, RadioTime (8,750 radio stations) and FrameChannel, which grants access to various “channels” like Facebook, .Mac, Picasa, People.com news and National Geographic. Kodak says it will incorporate YouTube access in January; I got a sneak peek at the interface for this and it looks well-organized.

Yet the HD Player’s smart combination of software and remote left me wishing it did a bit more. Photo sharing is enabled only via Kodak Gallery, so you can’t use another Web-based account to share photos directly from your TV. Likewise, a blue light on the box slowly blinks only when new Picture Mail (a message containing shared photos) is received on a Kodak Gallery account, not when new photos are added on other sources such as Flickr Photostreams or Facebook pages.

The Home screen of the HD Player shows four categories: Pictures & Videos, Kodak Gallery, Music and Entertainment. Subcategories are where you might guess they would be, for example podcasts are listed under Entertainment. And a tiny Home icon appears in the top right corner of every screen so you can always get Home with one click. The Pictures & Videos category holds photos and videos from a currently selected Windows PC.

An unlimited number of Windows PCs can wirelessly pair with the player as long as they have special Kodak software installed on them. But only one PC’s content can be accessed at a time. I toggled between two paired computers without a problem, but would’ve preferred accessing music and photos from both sources simultaneously.

The HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a Wii remote control. Wherever you move it, a tiny leaf-shaped cursor appears on-screen. A Hide button on the remote will hide the cursor while you watch slideshows. The remote’s Back button is helpful; when pressed, it backs you out of one screen using visual effects that make the screen shrink into the TV as if you were moving backward.

A play button appears on the first photo in a folder so users can select this icon to quickly start slideshows. Whenever the HD Player receives new Kodak Gallery Picture Mail, or a slideshow is created on a connected PC, yellow alert circles appear on the screen to notify users and a number in the middle of these yellow circles indicates how many new items are available for viewing.

Some content on my PCs took a little while to be recognized by the HD Player, including podcasts that I subscribe to on iTunes. When they did show up, both audio and video podcasts played without issue and on-screen playback buttons made them easy to control.

The HD Player uses your photos to create automatically generated slideshows, called Picture Chronicles, once a week. These Picture Chronicles use up to 50 photos from the same time of year in all of your folders, for instance grouping all Thanksgiving photos together from the past five years.

Kodak has plans to make its player Mac-compatible in the future and also hopes to add other partnerships with new types of content following its YouTube announcement early next year.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player does its job well, bringing photos and videos that might otherwise live only on your PC to your big screen HDTV. For the holidays, this device could be a real plus. But Kodak has some work to do to make this a more useful Web-connected tool.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

The once-frustrating process of sharing digital photos and videos has noticeably improved over the past year, thanks to seamless Web-based programs that work like desktop applications. But many of these sites give all the power to whoever created the album, leaving invited guests to simply look at photos or add comments.

Shwup by muvee Technologies gives friends a common album in which to share digital photos and videos.

This week I tested shwup (www.shwup.com), a free Web-based application that’s available starting Wednesday from muvee Technologies and works as described above with only a few pitfalls. The concept is simple: Anyone who signs up for a shwup account can create an album filled with digital photos and videos, and this album can be shared with anyone else via email whether they have a shwup account or not. Recipients of these email invitations can click on an embedded link to view and add content to the album. Or users can completely skip visiting the site and instantly upload content by replying to the email invitation with attached photos and videos.

Muvee Technologies is best known for selling software that automatically creates short movies, or muvees, by blending digital videos and photos with music and transitions. Muvee’s namesake technology is a part of the free shwup site; a few muvees are automatically generated in each of the albums and everyone who is invited to the album can create muvees using its content. But shwup’s main focus is making sharing easier for everyone. It differs from most of the company’s software programs in that it’s free and completely Web-based.

A shwup album takes just a few minutes to set up and even less time to share. It works on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 browsers but won’t work on Apple’s (AAPL) Safari until the fall. Shwup is available Wednesday but is still technically in its beta, or testing, phase, and I ran into a few kinks. I had trouble getting its useful reply-to-email uploading capability to work when two friends and I tried to upload content to my album using attachments in email replies. My friends had to visit the site to upload content. Muvee couldn’t figure out what went wrong when I asked the company about it.

I did, however, add content to someone else’s album using the reply-to-email method, uploading a digital photo in seconds. And in another instance I received a shwup email invitation on my BlackBerry and replied to it with an attached photo, which — in seconds — sent that photo from my BlackBerry to the specified shwup album.

Shwup automatically makes muvees, or short movies with music and transitions, using album content.

A glaring omission from shwup is the ability to view photos in full-screen view, a feature that most photo-sharing programs offer in slideshow mode. A friend of mine said he would use shwup over other photo-sharing Web sites that require user names and passwords if only it had full-screen photos. Muvee recognizes this as one of shwup’s biggest issues and says it will add this feature in August.

I uploaded over 60 high-resolution digital photos into my first shwup album, noting that the only limitation on files is that no individual file can be larger than 100 megabytes. These images can come from your computer, Flickr, Facebook or any Web site. Out of curiosity, I plugged www.cnn.com into the Web site entry box and shwup automatically grabbed images from the site that were available for me to use. I checked two of the images and they were added to my album in seconds.

Shwup automatically made and added three muvees to my album, using my photos put to music it chooses with dramatically timed transitions. These short clips looked really well-done, and were labeled as “sample muvees” so as not to be confused with my content. I followed a few simple steps to create a muvee of my own for the album by dragging photos into a tray, choosing from seven different layout styles and a handful of stock music licensed by shwup.

An option lets you upload your own music to play with your muvee, which I did. Seconds later, my homemade muvee played with transitions that were perfectly timed to the beats of a Fountains of Wayne song. After filling an album with digital photos, videos and muvees that I made, I invited friends to my album using emails generated from shwup.com. Within each album, a clear list of whoever was invited to the album can be seen on the top right side of the page. If someone hasn’t shared content yet, he or she can be “poked” by anyone invited to the album, sending them yet another email invitation.

Everyone invited to an album receives notifications from shwup whenever someone contributed content to the album and everyone can change the layout of the album to one of three settings: Grid, Simple or Mosaic. Moving my cursor over an album’s images showed data about each file including who contributed the photo or video, when it was captured and how many comments it had received in the album. (Comments are readable after clicking on an image to see a bigger version of it.)

Digital videos are labeled with small Play icons to distinguish them from digital still images. But a friend who uploaded a video to my album pointed out that the still image representing his video was a gray square rather than a still of the first scene as it did with the other videos — perhaps because this is where the camera was focused at the start of the video. Without an image to illustrate what the video was, it wasn’t as appealing as the other videos and images. Muvee explained that the ability to select a still image to represent a video was available in its pay software, but not yet in shwup, though the company plans to add this to shwup in the future.

Another hitch: If you invite someone to your album and then add something to the album you’d rather they not see, you can’t un-invite the person. Muvee says it plans to add the ability to un-invite members in July. Individual contributors have the ability to delete or “unshare” the content that they added to an album, while album creators can unshare and delete all pictures or entire albums. Album creators also are given the authority to merge albums.

Along with shwup, muvee also announces a new version of its downloadable pay software Wednesday: muvee Reveal. This $100 software has much more detailed features that specifically tweak your videos to become extra personalized.

When it works, shwup serves as a neat, artistic way to share photos quickly. Friends and family will be relieved that it doesn’t require any forgettable usernames and passwords, and the email-uploading tool will make anyone who knows how to attach something to an email feel like he or she can contribute to a photo-sharing Web site without a second thought. After shwup adds its full-screen photo-viewing option and clears up the glitches of its email-uploading feature, I’ll be using shwup for many group events to come.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week I tested SeeToo, a free service that lets you share videos in the same time that it takes to open and watch them on your own computer. Even better, you get to watch the video along with the people with whom you’re sharing it and type comments to each other in real time.

SeeToo works when one user selects a video to share with other people, who get an emailed hyperlink to SeeToo’s Web site, seetoo.com. After opening the link, these people join a SeeToo session during which everyone can watch the same video at the same time.

With SeeToo, you and your “buddy” can watch and chat about a video at the same time.

While the video is playing for the group, each viewer can pause, rewind and fast-forward the video. A space below the playback screen allows friends to send instant messages to one another during the session. There aren’t any limits to the size or type of video file that is shared, and other types of media — including music and photos — can also be shared on SeeToo without size restrictions.

SeeToo sounds too good to be true, and in many of my tests, it was. The service became available to the public in January in its beta, or test, stage. But I’ve used many other products in beta that were in better shape than SeeToo. And there is one major catch: Once a video-sharing session is over, the participants, other than the person sharing, can no longer access the video.

People who are invited to watch videos on the service can do so using any popular Web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) on Windows (MSFT) computers and Macs (AAPL). But the person actually supplying the video and initiating the sharing session can use only a Windows PC. The initiator also must download a browser plug-in, which seems old-fashioned in the world of Web-based applications. And sharing sessions time out after 15 minutes of inactivity on the initiator’s side, after which point the email link doesn’t work.

I was able to successfully initiate a SeeToo session using Firefox and Internet Explorer on an older Windows XP computer but had trouble with two computers running Windows Vista: Neither worked with SeeToo using Internet Explorer and only one worked using Firefox. SeeToo says this is due in part to Microsoft’s new Service Pack 1 for Vista, and the company claims it will have this problem fixed by today. I also had trouble with the sound.

The concept behind SeeToo is also somewhat limiting. Some people may not be able to watch a video exactly when someone else wants to watch it. Some might rather watch videos alone than with others. And typing out back-and-forth chats while videos are playing could be somewhat of a distraction from watching the video.

I tested SeeToo by sharing video with family and friends and watching video they shared. My sister and I got a kick out of watching video footage from a wedding I attended in October. I shot the video using an inexpensive, low-resolution Flip Video camera and the footage looked pretty good. But SeeToo’s site shares video on a rather small screen, and we both wished it were larger.

We sent instant messages to one another in a small space below the screen, making comments about the guests’ dance moves and the DJ’s choice of music. I used on-screen tools to pause the video when the camera passed by a friend whom I wanted my sister to see. To take a second look, she selected her screen’s Take Control button and rewound the footage to see my friend.

For the first two seconds of a video, users can see a small image in the top right corner of their screen that displays what the other people are seeing. SeeToo explained that this is a way of confirming one person is indeed seeing the same screen as another person.

I originally invited three people to watch the video with me. One friend I invited was at work, where his computer restricts him from watching videos. When he got home that night, the email hyperlink didn’t work — nor did it explain that the session had expired. Instead, it crashed his Firefox browser. I also invited my boss to watch the video with me, but he only saw my invitation two hours later when the session was over.

I didn’t even try to invite my parents to see the video because neither of them sit in front of a computer all day long and they wouldn’t have received my invitation in time to see the video.

In some ways, it was probably better that the other people I invited to watch the video weren’t able to see it, because the instant-message chat screen currently labels everyone as “buddy,” without distinguishing one person from another. SeeToo hopes to change this in future versions of the service by offering users a chance to register, thus receiving a specific nickname for chatting purposes. As of now, no one who uses SeeToo needs to enter any personal information such as a name or email address, which is a plus. SeeToo is also ad-free as of now, but the company plans to monetize parts of the service sometime this summer.

I also shared music and photos with friends using SeeToo, but this feature isn’t obvious; the site is primarily focused on sharing videos. Music playlists can’t currently be shared with friends, nor can photo slideshows be shared. Instead, individual songs or photos must be selected and shared within a session, one at a time.

SeeToo has high hopes of adding many features in the future, probably by June. Those features include a full-size, higher-resolution viewing screen for sharing and watching videos; a fully Web-based, download-free version of SeeToo; photo slideshows; using names to distinguish viewers; and sharing sessions that don’t time out. In addition, it hopes to let Mac users initiate sharing sessions. The site aims to be out of its testing stage by September.

Right now, SeeToo can come in handy if you know someone else is at a computer and ready to watch a video. The invited guest never downloads anything and neither party needs to register to use SeeToo. But its screen is a bit on the small side, and the service needs to become more versatile before it can be seen as a reliable sharing site.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Tubes installs a program on the desktop (right) into which files can be dragged and shared using automatic synchronization.

This week, I tested another product in the long line of programs that uses automatic synchronization to simplify the process of sharing large files by giving you the ability to change files and privacy options at any time. It’s called Tubes (www.tubesnow.com) from Tubes Networks and it takes its name from the pneumatic vacuum-tube system commonly used in bank drive-throughs that motivated me to join my Mom on visits to the bank as a kid. Mom would pull up and a container would whoosh over through a tube to arrive beside the car window; after a quick exchange it returned with her deposit slip and a lollipop for me.

Tubes aims to work with the same sort of magic. Once installed, its desktop application stays opened on your computer as a place where “tubes” are made for sending files. Any type of file can be dragged, dropped and sent off to share with other people using these virtual tubes. As soon as you release data into a tube, a whoosh sounds (like that of the vacuum tube) and your files are encrypted and uploaded to the Tubes server.

Invited guests view your tube’s data in its full, uncompressed format. The owner of the tube always has the final say on what is shared with whom, and changes made to tubes on your hard drive are detected instantly via automatic synchronization, guaranteeing viewers will always see the latest version of the tube. Shared tubes are also accessible via the Web, saving viewers from downloading the Tubes desktop program.

Other products like Sharpcast (www.sharpcast.com) and Pando (www.pando.com) also offer ways to share large digital files; Sharpcast uses synchronization similar to that of Tubes — it all happens behind the scenes without any work on the user’s part.

Tubes is available in a free version that provides a gigabyte of storage, or in paid versions with five, 10 and 20 gigabytes of storage for $6, $11 or $21, respectively.

Most of the time, Tubes worked well for me when I installed it on two Windows machines, one running XP and one running Vista. Tubes’ smart use of an already familiar process — dragging and dropping — gives you the impression that you already know how to use it and makes sharing files seem easy. I started dragging all sorts of files into tubes that I created, naming them and labeling them with a representative icon (one of 10 offered by Tubes or one of my own images).

For all its usefulness, Tubes certainly has room for improvement. For now, there isn’t a Mac version of the program, and when friends and I tried accessing shared tubes using a Mac Web browser, the results were inconsistent and sometimes didn’t work at all. Windows Vista had its own issues. After installing Tubes on my Vista laptop, an error message labeled “invalid argument” made me feel like a member of the debate team. And I couldn’t see thumbnail images of photos in my tubes using Vista, though I could on Windows XP.

Today, Tubes is releasing an updated version of its program that aims to improve the usability and look of the product, including refining the processes of sharing tubes and looking at tubes via the Web.

Before sharing tubes, I adjusted the permissions granted to each guest by labeling them as a Reader, Author or Editor; only the Owner can invite others to view a tube. But these labels can get confusing. More than once, I granted guests the highest level of permission, which is Editor, allowing them to make changes to the files in my tube, only for the guest to be asked for his registered Tubes email and password, which an invited guest shouldn’t need.

The Tubes experience was best when the recipient of my Tubes invitations had the application installed on his or her desktop.

After installing Tubes on a computer at work, I installed it on my home PC and easily auto-synched tubes that I created at work onto my home PC — a big plus.

Tubes incorporates the Web by assigning a unique URL to every file in every tube, and every tube automatically generates its own Web site, or “tubeSite,” as it’s called. Individual URLs for each file can be found by right clicking on a file and selecting an option to copy the URL into an email or browser. I copied the URL of a shared MP3 audio file and pasted it into my browser; it played a Fountains of Wayne song with no problem. But sharing these URLs with others is only possible if the owner gives permission.

Comments about tubes can be made in the “tubeBlog” — accessible through any tube in the application or online. I created a tubeBlog for a tube with photos from one of my vacations, adding descriptions and comments to specific photos. Others, with my permission, could do the same, using the photos from the tube or just leaving comments.

A friend used Tubes to share photos with me while vacationing in Italy and Amsterdam. I added my own travel photos and an itinerary made in Microsoft Word to his tube and changed the tube’s title; these alterations synched instantly.

Even if you aren’t online, you can access tubes or make changes to them by dragging files in or taking them out; updates are made automatically the next time your computer connects to the Web.

Tubes is off to a good start, but it needs to improve its system to make permission levels more understandable for tube owners and those invited to see a shared tube. With a few improvements, Tubes could be a product that I’ll continue using on Windows computers long after this column.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com