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Miro is a free Cross Platform media manager and has built-in library streaming and video converter. Just put in RSS feeds or have it monitor folders.

http://www.getmiro.com/

Or as an alternative to Songbird on Windows which doesn't do Podcasts (and doesn't look like it ever will) Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ is pretty good, especially if you pair it up with Winamp http://www.winamp.com/ for Shoutcast streaming radio.

I use a Mac Mini for my media player. I get some content using Miro (http://www.getmiro.com/). I play video content with either Miro or XBMC (http://xbmc.org/). For audio, I use Music Player Daemon (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki) and control it with my phone or a laptop. It just works.

so that it works with the likes of Ubuntu TV, Boxee, and maybe even Miro so we don't have even MORE competing standards I'll be happy with it. Having LG on-board is the best thing I've read about this, hardware manufacturers are often one of the most important steps, and my LG Blu-ray player is the coolest thing in my living room. Even if the Blu-ray drive quit working that player would still be the central part of my entertainment setup considering all the online and UPNP support built in. LG is the right partner for this. Samsung is not unfortunately, I tried going Samsung first but I found their local media support to be a joke. Their online stuff wasn't bad, but the player was sluggish and buggy.

Once ISPs in the US start pushing for better access to more places cable will become irrelevant and I can't wait.

The only way is to not have anything to do with them. Don't buy their shit and don't copy their shit either. Even if you think that because you don't pay them and just watch or listen to some of their content that doesn't help them but in fact that still affects your thinking and if you should happen to stumble upon something you like, you couldn't share it with anyone (without promoting RIAA/MPAA which we don't want to do). Also, if you can't kick the habit, you'll never feel the need to think outside the box. You'll miss a whole universe of really cool stuff.

I did it. At first it felt strange deleting the fairly respectable collection I'd hoarded and to start 'just saying no' but after some time you started to feel about it like the transition to GNU/Linux. So clean and rewarding. And just like with free software, there's no going back from free culture. And you'll feel free, you don't need The Man for anything. There is a massive expanding universe of good, freely licensed stuff out there. You can start with http://libre.fm/ (music) and http://www.getmiro.com/ (music and movies). I'm sure other people have more suggestions as well.

The MAFIAA is an extremely harmful group to the society at large in so many ways outside the scope 99% of people think of as their jurisdiction. They're boldly taking away our most basic human rights to perpetuate their outdated business model based on artificial scarcity. They must be killed before they do it to our way of life.

No, he's looking for a media aggregator with broadcatching capabilities. Miro is fine, but it's no more the "answer" to that than "firefox" is the answer to "I'm looking for a worldwide network of hypertext pages".

Huh? This article is titled "Finding Independently Produced TV Shows" and clearly states that that is the objective for the submitter (bornagainpenguin) when its summary says (emphasis mine):

I'm wondering what else is available that is independently produced and has a greater emphasis on plot and actually finishing the story? I'm already a fan of efforts like [...] so I know that great things are possible, I just don't know where to find them! Can you help by making some recommendations?"

So how does he appear to be looking for a media aggregator with "broadcasting capabilities?" The question is akin to "I'm looking for web sites to go to" and Miro answers like "try Slashdot."

However, if the question were about broadcasting, see the Miro Publishing page (how do you think it gets its content?). YouTube does this too...

Miro, previously called Democracy Player (as previously noted on slashdot), is an aggregation of independent TV programs. I believe it is exactly what you are looking for.

See also the Wikipedia articles on Web series and the (now defunct) Open Media Network ... and YouTube.

Other recommendations would include Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and The Guild as well as others listed on Wikipedia's Internet television series.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

http://www.hulu.com/

http://www.youtube.com/movies

http://www.getmiro.com/

I haven't paid for TV for over a year now. Neither did I torrent.

I don't mind VOD / pay for new movies. I can see people paying for latest-run TV shows, I guess.

And there's a lot of BBC stuff I'd like to be able to stream, legally - with some sort of reasonable model.

I'd like to see Doctor Who and whatever that series was that had the British flying around trying to sell franchises, as well as many others - any of the early BlackAdders come to mind as well.

But these are OLD tv shows. You can make a few bucks selling ads and selling ads for DVD / Blu-ray discs. Consider the following VOD:

http://www.slashcontrol.com/free-tv-shows/babylon-5 (yes - all five seasons)

Next ones go without saying:

http://www.hulu.com/

http://www.crackle.com/

And here's the best content manager I know:

http://getmiro.com/

Note to BBC - I hear your iplayer is working now. Great. We don't need the DRM or the extra charges for shows that will come around in rerun on the same non-tiered channels we saw them on outside of your country in the first place - cheers, thanks a lot.

Personally I would be happy to pay Discovery money to be able to download or stream various programs they provide through the internet.

Save your money, get almost everything you want right here - http://www.getmiro.com/ - now available for more than just Mac.

I swear by it - I'm watching the Hubblecast HD right now (episode 27, in fact).

How many LOC are there in the project?

The FAQ says:

...the total number of lines of core Miro code, excluding blanks, is 46,258, but changing all the time.

Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ goes quite a way to make streaming media and video torrents an enjoyable experience. It is sort of the iTunes (without store) for video.

Once solution is to have all the broadband customers install/use wireless routers that can interconnect as many as possible to a geo-local area ( your local neighbourhood ) virtual private network that shares the bandwidth load for bulk content distribution across multiple customer to ISP connections. If N users wish to fetch the same content, each person only need to download 1/N of the content, using neighbourhood network to swap the different parts. Think of it as a neighbourhood bittorrent.

This could be set up/managed as a web service, with the client P2N2P ( Peer to Neighbourhood to Peer ) software running on each users computer ( or running as a proxy service on the wireless routers ), via managed a multi platform subscription aggregation client such as Miro 2.0 Open internet TV.

The service could operate like this:
1) Via a website or web2.0 interface, people create content "channels" which are a list of URIs ( HTTP/FTP/TORRENT) of content with descriptions, just like podcasts.
2) The service would then fetch the content, on demand and store the content temporarily on its host/distribution site. The host service would do sharing via torrent, so uploading is not done by the Neighbourhood Peers.
3) The service would hold the content and distribute it to P2N2P clients so that the content can be recombined via a local Neighbourhood VPNs.
4) Each piece of content itself be encrypted at the URI source, so the service need not hold the keys, to deal with any concerns over end use privacy issues.
5) The subscription aggregation client could incorporate and distribute advertising as a means of paying for hosting the service.

I point you to the ridiculously easy combination of Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ and TVRSS http://tvrss.net/

for exactly the setup you want. All the TV shows you want, searchable and automatically downloaded, ad free. Plus loads of free content on many subjects, also searchable. This is the reason my TV never gets tunred on anymore. Many shows also include HD downloads. Miro can also be used as a handy torrent downloader.

And then there's MIRO .

Along with this article with step by step instructions for having Miro seek out via RSS the programs one is interested in, Torrenting them, and waiting for one to watch them. (FYI, the article leaves out one important step in setting up the RSS feeds, this is addressed in the comments.)

It's a damned poor video card and monitor/TV that can't connect via at least ONE port or another.

As Miro runs on just about anything, even an old 1Ghz G4 Mac, as long as it has a decent video card, can easily process and display "content" on a monitor or TV.

Stick a TV tuner card in an empty PCI slot, plug in an antenna of some sort, and with some more free software and the TitanTV website , and maybe an IR Blaster in one of the USB ports for your cable box if you have one, you have an over the air/cable DVR. (at least in the US.)

Hell, given how cheap halfway decent computers are these days via eBay and Craigslist, you can wind up easily spending more on video and tuner cards than for the actual computer itself.

TV as we have known it is dieing. The easier the media conglomerates make it for us to watch their products, the more likely we are to accept some commercials. Be dicks about whole thing, and we'll watch your stuff commercial free. And considering how easy it is to watch commercial free RIGHT NOW, I don't think there's a whole lot they CAN do to get us to watch their commercials under any circumstances.

I think they just may have begun to sharpen that razor that will cut their collective throats from ear to ear, and that razor will be wielded by their own hands.

Cool!

http://www.getmiro.com/download/for-ubuntu/

Where are they?

Download links: http://www.getmiro.com/download/

for OSX, Windows, and Ubuntu (other linux users can build from source or download according to instructions on that site).

I'm posting this story and this here because I see a very important trend. Not only the convergence of the Internet and TV. But the passiveness of TV being replaced with a more active process. these two simply reenforce that but from the "my computer is a TV" rather than the aforementioned "my TV is a computer".

there is no open source software that can easily view YouTube content

http://www.getmiro.com/

works like a dream, on any platform

(You are right on all the other points)

You could have included Makezine's Miro subscribe link. For karma and shit.

Does anybody really write applications using XUL?

Miro is one.

Look to this site/page:
http://www.vuze.com/ , WB is participating too. Also there is Miro ( http://www.getmiro.com/ ) which will do lot better than Hulu.

If Hulu shows me "Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States", I can't really care about them. They didn't understand the Internet's 101. If their market is USA, there is something called Tivo and TV on/off button :)

Legal Torrents:
http://www.jamendo.com/ -CC music
http://bt.etree.org/ -Live music archive
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/ -Fan made movies (allowed by trademark owners)
http://www.getmiro.com/ -Free video downloader/player with Free content.
http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Legal_torrent_sites -List of many more

Plenty of Legal uses for the technology.

Miro (formerly known as Democracy player) is multi platform, has a rss feed reader and a bittorrent client built in.
It's multiplatform and being open source I bet it can be run as a daemon.

For the truly lazy, this article describes how to use Miro, the open source media player and download app to find and download TV series from the Internet via BitTorrent.

Be aware, in the article one VITAL step in the set up process is left out, but IS covered in the comments.

Set it up and let it run in the background. No more compulsively checking trackers, Miro does it all for you.

http://www.getmiro.com/

It has almost all the qualities that a broadcaster could want.... except DRM.

It is open source.
It runs on Windows, *nix and Macs
It uses Bitorrent to distribute content
It use RSS feeds to provide episodes.
It supports multiple codecs.

Seems like that would be a pretty simple way to provide content for ALL platforms. It meets almost all needs except instant streaming and DRM.

And if you must have DRM figure out a way to layer it on top of a working system, rather than re-inventing yet another DRM scheme with yet another proprietary codec, player, etc. etc. etc.

isn't bit torrent, and mirohttp://www.getmiro.com/ better for this? I understand multi-cast saves the broadcaster, at the cost of everyone else (those who doesn't want the content, get bandwidth used anyway.) getting feeds from anyone who thinks everyone will want to see their content? I understand in the scenario where 10 people on the same wire would want it multicast, but is that ever realistic outside of a enterprise setting? With miro/torrent everyone who wants to see the content instantly becomes a mirror, if the packet priority is set correctly in the torrent their will be a delay in the start, but it's not like the whole download has to be complete or be available for miro to start playing (I think, not true for a torrent currently, but a possibility.)

At the current price points and inconvenience factors, the market for PC/mac TV Tuners is probably close to saturated. To sell PC tuners, one has to either a) be satisfied with the meager increase in market as the saturation curve approaches its asymptote, or b) find a new market. Option a) is a loser. So that leaves b).

If Tivo can leverage their trademark familiarity -and- create an easy-to-install product, then they might be able to attract a new market segment and make some real money. Furthermore, it will attract new people to their subscription model, the market for which surely has become indistinguishable from its asymptote for some time now.

One could easily speculate also that Tivo is testing the waters for moving away from set top boxes and towards PC peripherals, or even integrated TV-ready PC/encoder systems.

As for the "TV on computers is unnecessary/threatening/diluting/eye-strainin" arguments, they're hard to support. I put EyeTV on the 24" iMac in our lounge area off the kitchen, and now no one watches anything in the media room on the big 42" TV with surround sound anymore, except the occasional DVD. The 24" display is fine for the size of the room it's in, and time shifting, rewind-and-review, and commercial editing make TV so much more watchable that a TV+Tuner+DVD just doesn't cut it. I haven't watched a commercial in months, except for one or two that caught my eye ("whoa - boobs!") as I was 30-second-skipping past them.

And we watch very very little content produced for the web. Except for a few programs like Democracy Now, it's all major network broadcasts and MPAA DVDs. We use Miro to torrent programs that we fail to record for some reason, or that our cable provider doesn't carry (they've been moving channels from clear QAM analog to digital only, and I *refuse* to lease a set top box). Web video is still far too poor quality to be watchable for long, and we have too little free time to tolerate much amateur content.

I'm gonna go drop $500 on a nice DVD+HD recorder for the media room to make it useful again, until I can afford to upgrade to the 1040p TV + Mac Mini + EyeTV combo. I've seen it done, and it looks great. If Tivo had a competitively-priced product that I could easily add on to a new 1040p TV that gave me complete freedom to shift, edit and skip content, without DRM restrictions, then I'd certainly consider it alongside EyeTV and MythTV.

I can recommend Miro for Internet TV (I disable the auto-download though). Thanks to TED Talks, Google TechTalks, NASA, Linux.com, and others, there's a lot of interesting content to watch.

http://www.getmiro.com/ It's free. It uses bit torrent so it won't crash your server. Has better resolution than youtube.

Don't forget to list it in the Miro guide.

Miro makes it pretty easy for people to browse for and download video that is distributed via bittorrent.

Try watching them with Miro. Fullscreen functionality, saved to your computer in high definition, automatic downloads of the latest episodes, and yeah, fullscreen downloads. Search for TED in the Miro guide after installing and add the channel. Watching TED talks is one of the things that got me interested in Miro development :)

(The UI is nice but sometimes feels a little slow and clunky... that's being totaly overhauled for the next release.)

This same thing was asked roughly 9 months ago which got me thinking about my own solution. At first I was going to set up something like FreeNAS in a VM (easy backup, save states, etc.) but soon realized I needed more.

What I have now is a dedicated machine with four 500 gig HDDs in RAID 0+1 (I wanted 1+0 but I couldn't find the option and it's too late now).

In addition to a place on the network to store all my excessive files I can also use it for things like downloading media with Miro and sharing the media with TVersity, which allows me to stream media to my 360 etc.

In addition I added an RSYNC relationship (with deltacopy) between it and my primary PC for backing up and it is running JungleDisk (attached to Amazon's S3) for auto backup offsite.

It also is there if I want to rip and re-encode a DVD to DivX but still use my main machine for something else.

This is probably more than you were asking for but it is working pretty well for me.

If you wanted a low-power solution you could set all the above up with one of those mini-itx VIA boards (just buy a bulky enough PSU). The only devices I have are the five HDDs and a rarely used DVD-ROM. It doesn't actually take a lot of watts even with a normal board.

VIA mini-itx resource:
http://www.mini-itx.com/

DeltaCopy:
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

Miro:
http://www.getmiro.com/

TVersity:
http://tversity.com/

JungleDisk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/

Amazon S3:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

What's the different of that and Miro? http://www.getmiro.com/

Not only was Miro documented in the original post as recommended for watching the show, but it sounds like they may have been instrumental in the success of the project.

The folks at Miro say:

"NRK estimates that a high percentage of the downloaders are using Miro. Which is good, because using bittorent can be a complex task for non-technical users, but Miro makes it so easy to use. The ease of use is very important, because it encourages more people to participate in watching and sharing the shows. Technically, the cost to the producer for distributing to a handful of viewers, say 300, is basically the same as doing so for 1,000,000 people."

You should all get medals! Marvellously ingenious. Publish more content through torrents. I'll gladly pay the license. I actually think you could increase your licensing with a 1000kr [Norway-bucks, corresponds to something like 170$ from a conversion rate of 1NOK->0.18USD] a year. The quality is excellent. Keep going!

Try out Miro. It's a TV like app for the computer that even has a channel guide. It downloads the shows you want. http://www.getmiro.com/

if TV disappeared tomorrow, so would all your torrents.

Seconded, thirded and fourthed! http://www.getmiro.com/ I waste hours at a time catching up on the shows with Miro. I have all the Revision 3 stuff like Diggnation, Webdrifter. Totally Rad Show etc.. and quite a few more. This is the real future of TV. Oh, and http://www.purepwnage.com/ is the most awesome of all :D

There are many viable alternatives to standard television. So far the one I use the most often is Miro. It offers a wide variety of video in an easy to use interface. I really like the way it uses rss. That makes it really easy to tell when there are new shows to watch. Also if you want to, Miro can be used to grab "real" tv shows as well.

Another option is Joost. Lots of good stuff there but I find it much more difficult to find out when new episodes of my favorite shows are available so I tend to forget about it.

Finally I have been pleasantly surprised by hulu. Watching old episodes of my favorite shows from the 80's has been fun.

I know that many people don't like to watch TV on their computer but for me placing a 17" laptop on my lap and relaxing on the couch is better than watching our small 32" tv. For the times when others want to watch something as well, I have it setup so that I can easily connect my laptop to the tv and watch it that way. Today's HDTV is almost the same thing as a large computer monitor and usually can be used as such.

First, in the article outlining what's available over the web, they missed my favorite, that I highly recommend to all, Miro: http://www.getmiro.com/ - it's free and it supports Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Next, I'm going to shamelessly recycle one of my posts from another thread about Microsoft and others looking at internet over TV airwaves because if it comes to pass that that takes off, and if I'm right, then there may be a less-clear technical landscape for TV via internet than we might hope for today, especially for merging computers with TVs. (And, yes, I know most all HDTVs are already merging technologies on some levels.) Apologies if my point remains unclear, but it's this - I'm not ready to believe that commercial interests - led by Microsoft - won't yet win and screw us all. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423982&cid=22111742 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423982&cid=22127942

Such as downloading Linux distros and free and open source software.

Some musicians, such as Michael David Crawford release their music in free OGG format with an open source license that allows it to be spread by BitTorrent.

Not only that but Joost and Miro are video players that use P2P and BitTorrent to share videos that are also released into the public domain, open source, and free licenses.

Like I said there are 100% legal reasons for using BitTorrent and P2P filesharing networks. This will hurt the free and open source market more than it cuts down on piracy. It is like giving commercial licenses a free pass and filtering or blocking the free and open source licenses. Some people write articles and howtos via Legal Torrents to promote their web sites in a free or open source license, as well as help out the community.

just like you can use any number of proprietary image formats and w3c never recommend a patent-free image format... oh wait .. there was the whole png standard. How many png images where used on the web before it was a recommended? MPEG as a "standard" is irrelevant as long as it remains non-free to implement, since distribution costs are inherently incompatible with free browser distributions. Ogg theora is on the other hand perfectly compatible with being distributed in a proprietary system.

A codec agnostic implementation of the video tag is next to worthless. A simple javaScript library could accomplish the same thing.. Codec agnostic video tag resents no significant difference from the object/embed tags that we already have today. If that approach is taken video will remain a second class web citizen wrapped up in proprietary encapsulations. The whole point of the w3c is to promote/develop interoperable technologies, in the current browser environment non-free implementations are not interoperable. The w3c will be obsoleting themselves if they take the codec agnostic approach.

The drive for codec agnostic video tag is simply an effort to put a proprietary wedge into web video distribution platform. The codec agnostic video lets proprietary technology providers squeeze hugely profitable wedge into the web platform. This represents a new, undesirable, untested and unhealthy direction for the web. We are already well down with the consequence of proprietary video being felt worldwide. road of proprietary web with flash video and its network effect that pushes web technologies into service model more so than other web platforms that are based on open standards such as wikis and blogs that have been mostly distributed. of consequences that is only starting to be felt. So far Adobe/On2 has been very lax in enforcing their proprietary codecs with many sites getting away with using ffmpegs flash video encoding for "free". But we should not give away ownership key portion of the web platform to a single corporation. Its antithetical to what the web platform is and why it has been so successful.

You can use Miro to download streaming videos and watch them later; I have the same problem as you do, this tool is a good solution.

Maybe like put putting it on Miro? http://www.getmiro.com/

Besides, stopping people from skipping through the video doesn't really correlate with "viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment"

--Ketil

Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is a free way to do this and not be tied to any proprietary formats. Worth looking into.

I'm not talking about a low-quality, 2 minute clip shot by a 13 year old, replicating the mentos+coke video. Youtube is an interesting experiment, but at least it's current incarnation is little more than a fad.

I'm actually talking about a high quality video feed produced by professionals that would play on my IP-TV capable television.