Miro, in its core, is a video player. The developers have moved beyond that however and included lots of interesting options and features that make Miro more of a media management, downloading and viewing software.

You see, Miro supports Bittorrent, online video portals like YouTube and video conversions, something that only few video players offer at this point in time. Even better, it includes a show list to get you started right away.

As I said, Miro 4 Beta introduces new features. From improvements under the hood like a noticeable better performance when using the client, over geeky stuff like navigating the user interface with the keyboard, to something for everyone like the ability to sync devices or sharing with Miro libraries on a local network.

Especially the new synchronization and sharing options could prove to become very popular on campuses, companies and other mid-sized local networks.

Here is the full feature list of the first Miro 4 Beta:

• Share with other Miro Libraries on your local network
• Sync devices and copy media
• More ways to make playlists
• View the playback and download history
• Improved searching and organization of your music
• Easier ways to add music and video to your collection
• UI Navigation with the keyboard
• Better performance

Not everything is explained in detail in the beta version yet. The help file for instance loads the latest stable help which does not mention the new features at all.

Probably the biggest feature in Miro 4 is the ability to import music from iTunes.

Even better, it is possible to monitor the iTunes library for new music to add it automatically to Miro as well. The beta of Miro is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Expect a final release of Miro 4 in the coming months. (via Caschy)

The video player and organizer Miro has not been mentioned a lot, if at all, when it comes to downloading videos from Youtube. That’s surprising as it offers all the bells and whistles needed to not only play videos but also to download and organize them.

Miro combines an elegant interface, compatibility with many popular videos formats and the option to download most videos from the Internet under its hood.

It begins by downloading Open Source application Miro from the official website. Miro can change the homepage and default search engine during installation, users who do not want this should pay attention to the installation process.

The first stop should be the preferences which are located under the File menu at the top menu bar. The two main settings that may need to be changed can be found under Folders and Disk Space.

The video download directory is set to the user directory by default. Some users may want to change that to another location.

Even more important than that is the disk space preference. Miro stores videos only for six days by default which may not be enough for most users. It is possible to select a different retention time up to never which would essentially mean that videos are not deleted automatically by the application.

It is actually pretty simply to add a website to Miro. All it takes is to click on Sidebar > New Website in the top menu. A small form is displayed that accepts website urls. Users who want to download videos from Youtube need to enter youtube.com. It is possible to add other video sites such as Dailymotion or Gametrailers, but downloads are not supported on all of them.

Miro adds the video portal under websites in the left sidebar. A click on the website opens it directly in Miro. A small header bar with controls is displayed on top of the website. Here it is for instance possible to navigate back and forth, load the homepage again, open the page in the default browser or to download the video.

All that users needs to do to download a video is to visit the video page and click the Download this video button afterwards. Miro will then download the video automatically from Youtube.

It is now theoretically possible to load another video. All videos that get downloaded by Miro are stored in the video library.

Downloaded videos can be searched or sorted in numerous ways including date, name, size or time. Miro offers additional options, for instance to create playlists of downloaded videos or to convert videos into a different format.

The biggest advantage of the video converter is its ease of use. All it takes to convert a video is to drag and drop it into the program’s interface or use the file browser to pick one, select the output format for the video and click the convert button.

That means it is possible to convert a video in two or three steps.

Advanced users will definitely miss options to change video parameters or to queue videos for batch processing but that’s probably not what the program has been designed for in first place.

It would still add value to the software if the developer’s would add those “advanced” options to their program to make it usable for additional usage situations.

Miro Video Converter will automatically convert the video into the correct sizes and formats if one of the supported phones or devices are selected. Supported are amongst others the iPhone, iPod Touch, Classic and Nano, PSP, G1, HTC Hero, Droid / Milestone, Nexus one, Cliq and Droid Eris.

The video converter is using FFMPEG and FFMPEG2Theora to convert the videos into the desired formats.

Miro Video Converter is available for Windows and Mac operating systems. The developer’s have made available the source code of the application as well.

But Miro offers more than that. It includes a torrent client that can be used to download video torrents to view them in the media player once they have been downloaded. It is furthermore possible to subscribe to RSS feeds of media sites to automatically retrieve new media when it is published on those sites.

Here are the major changes in Miro 3:

• Subtitles – If subtitles are embedded or in the same folder as your video, they will be available automatically in a new drop-down menu. Or pick any subtitle file.
• Faster Faster Faster – Miro is faster and snappier in all sorts of ways from downloading torrents to deleting lots of files. For example, launching Miro is over 150% faster! Downloading torrents is faster!
• Louder Louder Louder – The maximum volume for videos is now at least twice as high. Really nice for laptops.
• Edit file info – Easily change the title, description, and category of a file.
• Play Externally – We’ve added an option to play all files externally and a right-click menu for single items.

Interested users can take a look at the release notes that lists all the changes and additions to the video player. The developers have also created a user manual that explains the features of the program in detail.

The video player Miro 3 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac from the developer’s website.

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.

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.

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.

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.