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Democracy Player is 0.9.2 and Growing Up Fast
Dean writes "Democracy Player, the open source answer for RSS video aggregation/playback, has just made it to 0.9.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you haven't tried Democracy Player for a while, it's time to try it again. The application is more responsive and stable, uses less memory, integrates Bittorrent, and can now play Flash videos (including stuff from YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc). Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources." In many ways, Democracy is the template of what I'd like to see out of Apple's upcoming iTV. Although my guess is that it will be more like MythTV- only for people willing to put in the effort.
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
For many many services the ideal number of people is just above the critical mass level of committed/dedicated users who will put in the time and effort to make things work and just below the level at which it get's noticed by the wrong people. Making it difficult to use (but powerful and flexible - features that are attractive to the dedicated people who add the most value) is a reasonable strategy for community based systems.
Beep beep.
I tried it out. I quickly noticed it was using XUL. XUL apps, like Firefox and Thunderbird, *each* consume large amounts of my computer's memory. They need to come up with a shared, one time loaded XUL library for XUL apps.
Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources.
;)
You use any number of the video downloading apps available for Firefox, save it as a real video format, and watch it that way -- then, regardless of what device you watch it on (mobile or otherwise) you can still use it.
Personally, I prefer it that way, but that's true Democracy
I just installed a copy of Democracy. It offered to install SIX codecs for my QuickTime installation. While that's great and all, how many of those are free?
I saw in the list some freebies like FLAC, but I also saw "flash." IIRC, the flash codec was only available to those who purchased Flash Pro.
Am I right?
Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.
USENET represents the closest venue we have for true and complete freedom of expression. People can post about virtually any idea, concept, thought or belief. They can transmit image and video data. In short, it's the freest place we have. And as a result, there will be stuff there that boils your blood, and makes you want to shit your pants. That's what freedom of expression is all about. It's about seeing spam, viewing pictures of Goatse's gaping anus, and reading about how the TCO of Windows is less than that of Linux. And as much as we may hate such ideas, we have to be thankful that we have the freedom to read them, and somebody else had the freedom to post them.
The benefit of Democracy is that it saves bandwidth for the producers given that it uses bittorrent. Also, it offers channels via RSS, such as a particular show that you like, so if something new comes down the RSS feed, Democracy can automatically download it and add it to your media library. Once it puts the video file on your computer, you can reencode it to other formats if you like.
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/democracy/sr c/
download and burn linux with one click on windows
The thing I don't like about democracy is it will download content with formats that it doesn't know how to play, which completely defeats the point of it, forcing you to use an external player anyway. mplayer plays them (everything) fine, so I don't think it's a codec issue.
The other issue is content. After spending about an hour searching for and downloading content I didn't end up with anything that I thought was particularly worthwhile. A replacement for TV it is far from...
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"emerge -s democracy Searching... [ Results for search key : democracy ] [ Applications found : 0 ]" Welcome to our Monarchy.
Disagree with me? Tell me why, but follow these rules.
I just reinstalled Kubuntu 6.10 yesterday, and so this morning, seeing this article, I decided to install Democracy.
So far it looks pretty nice, but if I try to view any feeds, I get an error telling me that the PSM is not installed (despite the fact I did install that package) and then it freezes and I have to kill the process.
Looks promising, but I can't really do anything with it til I find out about this problem, and I don't know where to look.
Not the best example of stability I've seen.
Of what? Windows that let's an app crash the whole OS? You MUST have seen THAT before !
I gave this a try, thinking "This might be useful for me to keep up with my anime". However, it's still got a way to go before I will use this app. Here's what's stopping me.
1) My Content: You can select a directory that contains video content that you already have on your machine during configuration. But you only get to select one directory. After you select that directory, you don't seem to be able to change it.
2)I added animesuki to the "channels". This downloaded the RSS feed and set up roughly 1600 "programs". However it is set by default to start downloading *all* of them. After scrambling around I stopped them. This is a BAD default.
3)As far as I can tell, I can't specify which "programs" on a "channel" I want to download. It's all or nothing. I want to input a regexp here (seems like an unlikely feature for this app, though...)
4)I tried to play 2 files that I already had downloaded (REC and Touch). REC crashed the Democracy player. Touch played audio for about 3 seconds before hanging. Both of these are AVI packages with Mpeg4 codecs...
So, while interesting, I think I'll wait until it's a bit more mature...
Don't you trust democracy? If not, the terrorists have already won.
Democracy is approved by 4 out of 5 major countries!
PCF, which makes Democracy Player, is hiring developers:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/jobs/
Telecommuting is ok.
I suppose it's just a matter of what I'm used to, but I don't feel comfy in this app.
/wouldn't/ want to be playing a video fullscreen.
1) If you maximize the window, it covers the task bar. It has a fullscreen mode; why does it have to do this? Being able to see the task bar is one of the only reasons I
2) I've yet to find a way to close the channel guide on the left. It takes up valuable screen real estate.
3) In Media Player Classic, if you click on the video it stops of pauses. If you double click, it enters/exits fullscreen. I'm used to it.
That's just how I feel, in case anyone cares. I guess I'll stick with MPC, though I seriously hate how it steals input from the volume not on my keyboard away from Windows, making it change the video volume rather than system volume. Hate it, hate it.
Property is theft.
Great - they recommend uninstalling Java to use it.
Right. Brilliant.
How about going back to the drawing board and fixing the problem BEFORE releasing a crippled product? Ever occur to anybody on the project?
I hope this thing works better than Amarok which for no known or apparent reason just died on my Kubuntu. And Juk, which I tried as a replacement, wouldn't play anything at all. I'm back to using Kaffeine as my audio player as well as my video player.
Can anybody in the IT industry write code that actually works? Anybody? Anybody at all?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!