I would classify Miro as a videocast player with extended functionality. If you think Joost or Bablegum now you are wrong because Miro is open plattform while the other two are not. Open Plattform, what’s that again ? Open Plattform means that any video producer can get his videos on Miro and that every viewer can also add videos using urls. Try that with Joost.

Another huge difference is that videos are actually downloaded to your hard drive and placed by default in the My Videos folder if you are using Windows. That means that you can watch them, burn them or send them to a friend without problems. The option to send a email link to a friend also exists in Miro btw.

The quality of the video depends how it was encoded but I can say that it is better than the quality of Joost from what I have seen so far.

The channel system has another advantage. You can subscribe to channels and when you do that you can opt to download new videos automatically when they are published. A few default channels are already added to your sidebar but those naturally don’t appeal to everyone.

If you take a look at the categories offered you notice 3283 categories like Music, Food and Sports at the moment. A click on a category opens a list of available publishers and a click on a publisher the list of available videos from that publishers. Videos can be downloaded with the click of the left mouse button and can be added to playlists which are filled by dragging and dropping downloaded videos into them.

Besides the possibility to add videos from channels or urls users can also search popular video portals like Youtube, Google Video and Dailymotion and add videos found there to their library. Those videos are downloaded as well which means that you can watch them with another video player or send them to your friends easily.

If I had something to criticize it would be the following. You can’t reach the category list from everywhere nor is there a home button. I had to click on Miro Guide to access these features. Another criticism is that you can’t go back since there is no back button. This is for example irritating if you browse a channel and find a publisher that sounds interesting. Once you click on that publisher you can’t get back to the list of channels.

There is no way to navigate search results if you search one of the video portals. You only see a handful of results and can’t browse to a existing second page of results. At least I could not figure out how this would be possible. It would be nice if it would be possible to search multiple video portals at once and see one results list.

Yes, that screenshot is from the game Cannon Fodder on the Commodore Amiga by the Bitmap Brothers.

Related posts

• Test Driving Democracy Player 0.9.5 (0)
• Say Goodbye to Joost and Bablegum, here comes Zattoo (50)
• No Good Television (4)
• Miro 2.5 RC1 Released (1)
• Miro 1.2 released (1)

All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it – well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.

Down and Dirty is a Rock, Metal, Pop and Punk channel with videos from acts like Sum41, Korn and Everclear. This are not (!) music videos but some mix of music, interviews and other elements.

I especially like the R-rated movie section called Reel Junkies which is really enjoyable. You do find videos with many celebrities on No Good TV showing the Celebs from their “bad” sides. Great if you like this kind of stuff.

Related posts

• Zattoo Insufficient Bandwidth Message (2)
• Taking a second look at Miro (5)
• Say Goodbye to Joost and Bablegum, here comes Zattoo (50)
• Joost Live Test Run Tomorrow (0)
• Comparison of Joost and Babelgum (19)

If you are looking for high rated TV shows like Lost, 24 or Prison Break you’ve come to the wrong place. I was fortunate enough to get a temporary invite for Zattoo which is live TV on your computer. This is a different and probably the better working method for now to stream TV content over the Internet. Zattoo is a European company which already has more than 300000 subscribers to their service and will soon become available in many European countries including Germany, Great Britain and France.

I was able to test an internation version of Zattoo which was able to stream all tv programs currently available. Those are the same tv stations that can be seen in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Switzerland using a normal TV. Some of the stations that are currently available include: BBC Prime and World, Canale 5, France 2-5, ARD and ZDF and Rai Une to Tre.

Image quality of the shows is excellent, it takes a few seconds until all artifacts disappear but from that moment on it looks great. It is possible to watch the shows in fullscreen with a slightly better image quality than Joost or Bablegum offer at this moment.

Zattoo is currently preparing launches in major European countries and if they will be successful they intend to expand to the American market as well.

I personally think that Zattoo is far more complete at this stage than Joost and Bablegum are. You can actually see live TV which includes for instance sports events like Champions League, the Olympics and Formula 1. It is also a great assistance in learning new languages. What could be better to learn French than to listen to French television ?

Image quality is far superior to other known p2p Internet clients such as TVU Player. Watchout Joost, Bablegum – here comes Zattoo.

Related posts

• Zattoo Insufficient Bandwidth Message (2)
• Joost 0.9 is out (28)
• Zattoo available in Germany (3)
• Watch TV On Computer With RevoluTV (11)
• Watch Local TV Online with Any TV (3)