That was just one feature of Miro. The main one in my opinion is the ability to download videos from various sources including Bittorrent, video portals like Youtube, URLs and Video RSS feeds with subscription possibilities. So called Search Channels can be created. Say you like football and regularly check Youtube for new football videos. You could create a search channel which gets automatically updated when new videos get published.

A new version was released today which is a major step for the Miro team. Miro should run a lot smoother in this version especially because of the update to XULRunner 1.9 which should bring performance and memory improvements to the Windows and Linux clients. Check out the release notes if you are interested in a detailed list of changes.

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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.

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Democracy Player is not just a video player with support for most video formats such as divx and quicktime mov but also incorporates the internet with so called channels that use video feeds, rss channels, podcasts and video blogs which are sorted in categories like Comedy, Politics and Technology.

A great feature is the search routine for sites like Youtube and Dailymotion that makes it possible to search and download movies from those sites without leaving the player. Adding RSS channels is as easy. Just choose add channel from the menu and paste the RSS feed url into the box that popups. Democracy Player will do the rest and download the contents of the feed.

I’m not using bittorrent that often but the feature should be interesting for some users who do. Just load a torrent file into the player and it connects automatically to the peers and downloads it to your computer. The proxy feature could be useful if you want to stay anonymous during the process.

I could not find preferences for the torrent feature, the developers promised to add functionality to this process in future versions. I think that it would be better to use a program like utorrent to download movies for now and import them into the player when they are finished. Once preferences become available such as upload and download limits it could become the downloader of choice for movies.

The player can be downloaded for windows, linux and macintosh.

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Democracy Player has a nice video player, that supports different video formats, like MPEG and AVI for example. Democracy Player supports different ways to get videos.

You can add RSS feeds, podcasts and video blogs which are deliverd in the form of channels. You can also search trough a number of different video sites and download the media like you do of a channel. All the media that you download will go to the new videos/collections tab in which you can view them.

Democracy Player is very simple to use, while still delivering a great service. Some people made claims saying this is the Firefox for videos, i can’t say if Democracy Player will be as popular as Firefox, but it does have allot of potential.

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