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Linux Version of Democracy Player Released
clahey writes "The Participatory Culture Foundation just released Democracy Player 0.8.2 for Linux, the first beta version for Linux. It's a free software internet TV client with built in support for both RSS video podcasts and downloading using BitTorrent. It can even scrape web pages for videos. It's an excellent way to find great internet video. For example, once you've installed Democracy, make sure to check out The Postal Service - Such Great Heights on the Telemusicvision channel."
Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"
What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.
Perhaps if the video were mentioned in the article it would be more accepta--OH WAIT! What article? All we have is a link to the home page of this project. Okay, it's open source, and it's probably cool. Fine. Submit an article, or at least a summary that doesn't suck. This awful writeup belongs more on digg than on slashdot, in my opinion.
Democracy = TV = advertising = buying things and throwing them in landfills while your society overpopulates, pollutes, and destroys all finer things for convenience. Brilliant name!
exponentiation ezine
The last windows version was pretty bad. However, the linux version at least uses different user interface technology, and the last release was largely focused on stability. I just used it for a few hours on Linux, and for a first version, it's pretty good. Not without its faults, but download it, try it, file bug reports, and keep on using it 'til they're fixed; I'm sure you won't be disappointed :)
It's pretty sad when people invest a lot of work to counter commercialism, and even choose obvious and clear names ("Democracy player", "participatoryculture.org"), and people like you still don't get it and heap sarcasm on the project.
How clearly do you need to have things spelled out for you in order for you to absorb the information? Or have you watched so many Pepsi commercials that you have just switched off completely?
Because YouTube and Google are commercial sites that host the content with commercial motives in mind and with commercial constraints on their operations. They are free right now because those companies want to grab a big chunk of market share and prevent the kind of democratic, distributed infrastructure from appearing that Democracy player is intended to give you.
Democracy player is an attempt at letting anybody host and distribute video without having YouTube or Google-like bandwidth at their disposal.
I'm sorry if you don't get why this might be important.
Maybe it will help if you think a little about IM services. The reason why we have AOL and MSN and all those other centralized commercial services that play poorly with FOSS, that are easy to listen in on, and that impose all sorts of restrictions is not technical, it's because those services managed to grab market share quickly, before a distributed IM infrastructure could take hold. If it hadn't been for that historical accident, IM would probably be more like E-mail today, with tens of thousands of interoperable hosts and open protocols.
People would like Internet video streaming to be more like E-mail services than like IM services: distributed and open.
And if one is running Mandriva? Suse? .... .. then you learn about how to install the dependent software and build packages for your distro. If you are into Participating in your Culture, you will redistribute the package, or maybe even join the project and make a new package for each stable release. Sorry they don't have silver platters for everyone, I think it is pretty smooth that they have been able to develop this 'platform' for Linux, Windows and Mac at the same time.
I also think that they are being realistic by focusing on Windows and Mac computers because they are more commonly used by content producers and consumers.