2007-07-19

Miro Internet TV and Video Player

miro.png

The other day, while try to figure out how to make an RSS feed in Muse I found this page from a google search. At first I glanced over it, but upon a quick re-read I noticed the link to an interesting application called Democracy Player which upon clicking re-directed me to Miro. Miro bills itself as a free open source internet TV and video player.

Miro sounded pretty cool and they had instructions on how to install it on Ubuntu (not to mention Mac OS X, Windows, Fedora, Debian, and Gentoo as well). So I added their repository to my sources list, updated, and installed Miro. I couldn't find an application icon to launch it, so I just ran it from the command line. After a few quick questions it was up and running.

Wow is this thing cool and intuitive. As I clicked away, I very quickly had videos being downloaded in the background. Diggnation, Ask A Ninja, X-Play, Google Tech Talks, etc. Then I tried a custom search against YouTube and Google Video for Compiz and Berly. After showing me a list of videos for each it allowed me to create a feed from my queries that I could then subscribe to – very cool.

As I write this it is busy downloading some 100+ files I've already selected. Six are waiting for me to watch them now. Clicking on the Miro Guide presents me with some featured video feeds and the currently most popular. This is very similar to how iTunes works as well. Did I mention it was intuitive?

I could go into all of the cool things this application can do, but you really need to just install it yourself and start playing with it. I haven't been this excited about an application in a while. I might have to call this one a "killer app".

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Tags: miro software technology