Here some good news for all my friends using the democracy player and favour the approach of participatory culture.
Miro is the new name for the awesome Internet TV player previously
known as “Democracy Player.” Now that Democracy has gone 1.0 (almost, see below),
it’s got a new name, new features, and an incredible future ahead of
it. Miro is easy: just pick some channels — video podcast feeds — and
Miro will download all the video from your channels. Miro downloads
with Bittorrent, meaning that there’s never a problem with popular
sites going down because they’re clobbered by too many requests. Miro
can play any video, because it incorporates the free/open video player
called VLC, which plays practically every video format under the sun.
Miro also grabs YouTube videos, and has access to more HD content than any other source online or off.
The future of Internet TV is too important to belong
to one company. Internet TV needs to live atop something open and free,
the way that the Web lives on top of the open and free Firefox browser.
That’s why Miro is licensed under the GPL, the gold standard in
open/free licensing, meaning that anyone can take Miro and run with it,
improve it, sell it, or give it away.
Miro is created by a charitable foundation called the
Participatory Culture Foundation, an organization that also makes
complimentary, free packages like Broadcast Machine (for publishing
your own video channels) and VideoBomb (like Digg, but for video). The
foundation pays programmers to improve the technology, and it’s
entirely free to use and improve.
Miro is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Here you get the Miro.
Update: Nicholas
Reville of PCF sez, “We’re not quite at 1.0, this is called Public
Preview 1 (0.9.8). We wanted to give ourselves a little room for
refinement before we slap on the 1.0 label.”
Source: BoingBoing
