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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
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.
There may be some official flash codec from Adobe that you have to pay for, I don't know, but there are definitely other ways to play flash in quicktime.
Quicktime itself can already play older non-video flash presentations. And the flash video codec that Democracy player is asking you to let it install is Perian, an open source project that integrates libavcodec and a bunch of other video related OSS libraries into a Quicktime component.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
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
"emerge -s democracy Searching... [ Results for search key : democracy ] [ Applications found : 0 ]" Welcome to our Monarchy.
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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...