There are hundreds, if not thousands of content channels to choose from the latest movie trailers to the most popular Youtube videos to Ubuntu guides. It is also possible to add feeds that you discover that are not already included in Miro. These feeds will be handled just like any other feed.

It is possible to auto download new posts from the subscribed feeds or to download them manually. Miro offers a built in Torrent client as well which makes it possible to download audio and video torrents to watch them in the interface as well.

Version 2.5 of Miro comes with some serious (that’s what the developers call it) speed and memory usage improvements. It can be downloaded from the nightlies downloads page.

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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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Miro can also download and play Bittorrent videos. The process is pretty easy and straightforward. All you need is a url that points to a torrent file that contains one or more videos. Click on file > download in Miro to download the files automatically with Miro which does all the configuration meaning that you do not have to fiddle with Bittorrent settings at all.

This is great for the majority of people who simply do not want to configure thousand options to be able to download torrents. You can configure a handful of options though in file > options by clicking on the downloads tab. You may limit the upload or download bandwidth, select the ports that should be used for Bittorrent transfers, automatically forward ports and select if you want to reject unencrypted connections.

Once a video has been downloaded it is available in your library where you can watch it or move it into one of your channels. Downloads can be paused or canceled at anytime and users have the option to stop seeding the video when it finished downloading.

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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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