They do have a huge problem with linking to the sites mentioned on their website because all links lead to not found when I tried them. That is because they have added their address in front of the address of the website that they recommend. Besides that they list Unbox and Walmart in the Legal Downloads category which provide downloads after you purchase them.

A better place for these two – and others – would probably have been the Buy or Rent Movies category. Actually, several other websites mentioned in their legal downloads section are pay before download websites who probably offer a freebie every now and then.

Enough of the criticism. The effort is worth noting. I’m not sure if this is the first time the MPAA did try to offer alternatives (some free) instead of just suing and lobbying against Pirates. If you are a regular Internet user you know those websites already but it could be nice for some who just begin to use the Internet.

If they could fix the Pay / Free distinction they could create a valuable resource.

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.