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Linux Version of Democracy Player Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tune-in-turn-up dept.

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."

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. What's that saying again... by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Funny

    Never let open-source programmers decide the name of their applications!

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
    1. Re:What's that saying again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I tried installing Democracy but the corporations have root.

    2. Re:What's that saying again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I hear Democracy is not currently available in the US. ;-)

  2. Unfortunately, it's still buggy as hell... by Ritz_Just_Ritz · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been using the democracy player under OSX and Windows for the last several versions. It also frequently crashes, often taking out its config files in the process. The bitorrent bits wreak havoc on your network connection (on OSX and WinXP). The Linux version JUST became available, but given the problems with the more "mature" platforms, I'm reluctant to inflict it on my Linux laptop...

  3. slashvertising? by illuminatedwax · · Score: 5, Funny

    This player is really neat! But there are other players out there.

    For example, once you've read this comment, make sure you check out Nickelback's new smash hit, "All The Right Reasons" on www.supermusicchannel.com today! And once you've done that, make sure you go to www.pepsico.com for your chance to enter a FREE sweepstakes to win more Pepsi products!

    --
    Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
  4. Re:more like Democrack Player by cahiha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.