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Democracy Player Receives $100K Grant From Mozilla

Posted by Zonk on from the friendly-dinosaur-in-our-midst dept.

puntloos writes "The Open Source Internet TV Platform 'Democracy' has just received a $100,000 Grant from the Mozilla Foundation. Democracy is a combination of ways to view and download media to your desktop in an intuitive way, built on top of the ever-popular VLC video player. Seth's blog has details: 'The Mozilla Board agreed to support them for the following reasons: 1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web. 2. They're building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI -- and it's based on Mozilla technology. 3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for...they don't have any venture backing, they're running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.'"

71 comments

  1. well damn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    That tops my donation of $5.

    1. Re:well damn by asninn · · Score: 1

      Who knows. Compared to the income of the for-profit Mozilla organisation they've got now, it's really just a drop in the barrel.

      --
      butter the donkey
    2. Re:well damn by angrykeyboarder · · Score: 1

      The Mozilla Organization is Non-Profit. You're confusing it with the Mozilla Corporation.

      --
      Scott

      ©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
  2. It's great.. by dteichman2 · · Score: 1

    I've been using Democracy Player since its release, and it's only gotten better.

    This should give things a boost :)

    --


    Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
    1. Re:It's great.. by Cap'nPedro · · Score: 1, Funny

      Nope. Everyone knows that when you donate money to open source projects like this, the developers spend the money on beer and porn.

      $100K is gonna fund a hell of a lot of time wasting.

    2. Re:It's great.. by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      I like it, but it can be a lot better. I simply can't understand why it feels so bloated.

      --
      Beetle B.
  3. Great package needs more content by monopole · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A really great package, but it needs more channels and better search capabilities. And a transcode module for transferring content to iPods, PSPs and Palms.

    1. Re:Great package needs more content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm sure posting feature requests on Slashdot is very helpful & effective.

    2. Re:Great package needs more content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does it have porn?

    3. Re:Great package needs more content by bshensky · · Score: 3, Insightful

      uh, yeah, and how about some Democracy _daemons_ and standalone _front_ends_ for MythTV and XBMC? That'd be killer!

      Oh wait - I once tried to start a thread on the Democracy boards about doing just this and was summarily shot down because the powers in charge feared its Bittorrent foundations would set up Democracy as an RIAA/MPAA DMCA takedown target.

      It sure seems really silly that I have to run Democracy in a VNC server session on my MythTV box, media folder shared among Democracy and the Myth frontend, so that I have 10-foot access to my favorite Rev3, DLTV, Make and other video feeds. Sheesh.

      I REALLY REALLY want to like Democracy Player very badly. But until they let go of their PC-client mentality, they're really holding themselves back.

      --
      Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
  4. Sounds great! by jshriverWVU · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm anxious to see how this develops. My only concern with the "coming Internet-TV age" is the whole bandwidth throttling. What's to start some start-up from getting TV feeds like any cable company does and creating an internet-TV station.

    That with devices like Myth Boxes, and the media center boxes. I can imagine people giving up TV completely and just keeping their broadband connection. I know I would.

    1. Re:Sounds great! by doublestakk · · Score: 0

      Im no expert, but wouldn't content caching come into play here? Especially with the season finale that EVERYBODY is going to download.

    2. Re:Sounds great! by misleb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That with devices like Myth Boxes, and the media center boxes. I can imagine people giving up TV completely and just keeping their broadband connection. I know I would.


      Already there. No cable. No antenna. Just a Myth box running torrentflux (web front end for Bittorrent).

      -matthew
      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    3. Re:Sounds great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I get cable tv from my phone company (well, sort of cable, it gets delivered through the DSL line, just like my regular phone line) which is called belgacom (Belgium + Telecom = Belgacom. How cute). Signed up about six months ago. Anyway, the box arrived and I noticed that the UI looked a lot like the screenshots I had seen for Myth TV. Looking through the vent slots on the box, I could see that it used a normal hard drive, so being the geek that I am, I pulled that bad boy apart and stuck the hard drive in the spare slot on my desktop. Fired it up, mounted it, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a standard Linux file system. Not sure which distro they are using (and I am not quite geeky enough to spend the time figuring that out), but the mythTV binaries were in /usr/bin.

      Point is, lots of us have already made the trade you are talking about, we just don't know it yet.

    4. Re:Sounds great! by Daengbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      same setup for me. I'm living in S. Korea now, so there's very little on cable that I want to watch. We have a file server with TorrentFlux and MythTV on it. A great system, and surprisingly easy to set up this time. On Ubuntu 7.04, just install the special packages for frontend and backend and everything else is automatic. NVidia TVout completes the picture. Snazzy. I'm not going to use Democracy Plaer because I already have the set up, but I looked it over and sent a link to the webite to a couple of friends who aren't quite as geeky.

      --
      Put identity in the browser.
    5. Re:Sounds great! by aichpvee · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I hope you wrote Belgacom and demanded the source code for all the software.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
    6. Re:Sounds great! by misleb · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I didn't really "get" Democracy player. I browsed some of the channels and stuff and it seemed like mostly worthless content. I guess it is meant more for managing your own content? i dunno. i wouldn't know where to get it.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    7. Re:Sounds great! by Daengbo · · Score: 1

      I just played around with it, but it seems to me that adding thepiratebay RSS feeds in would be a good way to get good content. It does BT downloads and the main page in the player has a bunch of popular feeds on it. Torrent Portal also has feeds that work with it. Again, I'm not using it because I've set up a server specifically for this, but if I only had one comp in the house, I'd consider using it, for sure.

      --
      Put identity in the browser.
  5. First things first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    When will they give 100K to some developers to fix the long-standing memory leaks?

    1. Re:First things first by xENoLocO · · Score: 4, Funny

      They keep forgetting.

      --
      "The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
    2. Re:First things first by cthulhu11 · · Score: 0

      More to the point, where does a free software organization get $100k to give away in the first place?

  6. French Maid TV by Brit_in_the_USA · · Score: 1

    should be enough to ensure Democracy players success.

    1. Re:French Maid TV by Max+Littlemore · · Score: 1
      slightly off topic but...

      I have to say that, having not heard of Democracy Player until now, when I read the headline, I thought it was about some player from outside the US being rebranded by someone inside the US over some percieved insult, along the lines of the whole "Freedom Fries" episode. Then I saw the parent subject and that almost confirmed my suspicions....

      What kind of name is Democracy Player? I mean really? OSS get cops a lot of flak for names like the GIMP but I'd much prefer to have the GIMP on my PC than "Democracy Player". What does it do? Play democracies, for fucks sake?

      This may come across as trolling, but in all seriousness, when I read the name, I wanted to laugh out loud and simultaniously cringe. I'm certainly not installing it, even if it does show french maids.

      --
      I don't therefore I'm not.
    2. Re:French Maid TV by junglee_iitk · · Score: 1

      From wikipedia entry: Democracy Player (soon to be called Miro)

      Wait, ?

      Nevermind :) It is afterall, WIKIpedia :D

    3. Re:French Maid TV by junglee_iitk · · Score: 1

      Here, may be should update Wikipedia.

      http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/03/a-name-ch ange/

  7. Like VLC but better by Maverick390 · · Score: 1

    I've also been using Democracy for quite a while now, and it is a really useful piece of software. The guys deserve the grant, Congratulations!

  8. My suggestions for Democracy Player: by Stormx2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've been using this player for a long while now. However, it could do with some improvement:

    a) It is awfully slow, especially on startup. I'm not on a slow system, and other apps will be up within a matter of seconds.
    b) It isn't programmable from the command line ( --help will launch the player..)
    c) No lirc support
    d) No support for moving files once they've downloaded.

    This all relates to my current version, which I can't check at the moment. If any of this has been improved, please excuse this post (:

    1. Re:My suggestions for Democracy Player: by vunzzz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You might have a look at ToxTox. This is a Media Browser for your TV (full screen). You can fully control it with a remote and Lirc. Like Democracy it's completly open and free and multi platform. Although the development started only recently it's worth a try. It's just a better experience than using a desktop app for watching your favorite shows. See the ToxTox weblog

    2. Re:My suggestions for Democracy Player: by ndogg · · Score: 1

      They know people want this feature, so I don't feel bad about posting it here, but a FREAKIN' SYSTRAY ICON!!!!!!!!!

      I hate having to use up an entire spot on my taskbar just for Democracy.

      Oh, and it still crashes on my machine more often than any of my other desktop apps.

      --
      // file: mice.h
      #include "frickin_lasers.h"
    3. Re:My suggestions for Democracy Player: by aichpvee · · Score: 1

      Just turn off the taskbar. That's what I did and I don't miss it at all.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
    4. Re:My suggestions for Democracy Player: by Darundal · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that might be related to the fact that they still haven't hit the mystical 1.0 release yet (and unlike a lot of other open source software that is rock solid and amazingly fully featured before 1.0, Democracy needs it).

  9. Lets see where this takes us by Unknown303 · · Score: 1

    It will definately be interesting to see what they can accomplish with that kind of grant.

  10. XBMC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This sounds like it would be very nice for XBMC. Someone get to work porting it...

    1. Re:XBMC by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 1

      Or better, strip out the fancy XUL/Gtk/Cocoa based frontend, replace it with a web-based one, turn it into a daemon, and have it seamlessly pump content to your Xbox/A.TV/etc.

      --
      "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
    2. Re:XBMC by Ant+P. · · Score: 1

      Yes, because the world doesn't have enough hyperinflated desktop apps dependent on running an entire goddamn http server _each_ already.

  11. Re:That just goes to show by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When I first reader the title of the article I thought it was referring to some program that was advocating democracy so I was all prepared for a bunch of highly moderated rants from the Republicans on Slashdot about how advocating democracy puts us at risk from Islamic militants and how outraged they were that the Mozilla Foundation was funding Islamic militants.

    Thakfully, the title only sounded controversial.

  12. Here comes the fun by DynaSoar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Content owners/providers have been inching towards pay-per-view everything for some time now. Anything that gets in their way will get stepped on. My money says Mozilla just assured that Democracy will be among the first to get sued. Doesn't matter what for, as long as it makes them have to burn up more than $100K.

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
    1. Re:Here comes the fun by sumdumass · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You know, I hope your not right. But if they do get sued, it could be a rallying cry for more funding.

      I'm not sure I like it when non profits or companies who ask for donations donate to other non profit organizations or companies. It seems like mozilla has too much money now and we don't need to give them any more. I don't think that is the case in actuality but that turns out to be the general gist some will have. I know people who have donated to the red cross and the breast caner place who stopped giving money after those companies started donating to other charities. they will have the same impressions on something like this too.

  13. Re:That just goes to show by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    god I hate hippies

  14. My only complaint with it is that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My only complaint with it is that
    I wish you could set the speeds on the torrents in it...
    kills my bandwidth when i've tried to use it in the past.

    1. Re:My only complaint with it is that... by Daengbo · · Score: 1

      I was just looking at it for the first time and it has a max upload speed preference. Did you want a download limiter, too?

      --
      Put identity in the browser.
  15. That's cool but... by lixee · · Score: 1

    Maybe now they can fix that stupid Python 2.5 dependency that prevents its installation on Feisty? And maybe add some shortcuts to the video player. For God's sake, how hard can it be? Other than that, it's an astonishing product.

    --
    Res publica non dominetur
    1. Re:That's cool but... by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 1

      They have said that the bug will be fixed in 0.9.6, but no-one has a clue when that will be released. I think it might be fixed in the SVN version.

      --
      "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
  16. I used it by twice1109850 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    doesn't prominently give credit where due - vlc
    sits uploading torrents without asking, saves bloat files everywhere, did I mention bloat?
    and RRL [type "boingboing.net"] gave it props so it must suck.

    first twice1109850 comment.. I can see this account going downhill

  17. Re:That just goes to show by Shawn+is+an+Asshole · · Score: 2, Funny

    Correct. It costs $1.05.

    --
    "It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
  18. Agreement by jtull89 · · Score: 1

    I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that democracy is good for society.

  19. Own RSS feeds by tecker · · Score: 1

    Do you have to use their own RSS feeds for the system or can I import in some of my Broadcatching rss feeds from a few TVBitTorrAggrate type sites? If this allows adding your own RSS to the builtin torrent system i would use this in a second. I had seen Democracy earlier and bypassed it but if it work in this way a new user you will have.

    --
    Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
    1. Re:Own RSS feeds by agentforsythe · · Score: 0

      I have a whole bunch of feeds, one for each of my favourite TV shows. You may find feedburner.com useful in munging the output from torrentspy or wherever.

    2. Re:Own RSS feeds by Beetle+B. · · Score: 1

      Not entirely sure what you're asking for, but yes, it can use any RSS feed. See this tutorial/example.

      --
      Beetle B.
  20. Great by Mystery00 · · Score: 0
    Democracy is already a really good application, all that is left now is for ISPs to provide us with unlimited downloads and internet TV will blast off, I find it hard to understand why there are plans that say that you have to pay $60 a month, to provide you with a 20 gigabyte quota. With internet restrictions on how much you can download, internet TV will not work.

    Perhaps this is strictly speaking for the land down-under.

    --
    "we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
  21. Try TubeSucker for downloading and playing videos by Chingalaputa · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It free and load with features. http://www.newrad.com/software/tubesucker/ It can download videos from anysite. But it does especially well with youtube and youporn. It can dredge those two sites. It is nice being able to get all videos for a given search on youtube. But what is really cool, is that you can point it at your MP3 directory and get videos for all you MP3's, or other music files. You can then do it again, for LIVE In Concert versions of videos of your MP3s. It also stores all your youtubel links in a database so you can email the video links later on. It has a button that lets you email links of selected videos with one click. It also lets you add voice messages to your emails. (i.e. voice email) It does a lot of stuff. check it out. Hope this helps someone.

  22. Please no more embedded movies by teslatug · · Score: 1

    I can't take this overspread and reliance on flash. It chews up CPU like crazy and halts my system, and often I can't hear the sound. I've resorted to the unplug extension on fireox, downloading the movies, and playing them on mplayer. As cumbersome as this is, it doesn't work in all cases. Some are too deeply embedded. Of course there are also the newer movies that require flash 9, which theoretically has a linux firefox plugin, but it crashes firefox every time. Just give me the damn mpeg (or whatever format) to *download* please!

    1. Re:Please no more embedded movies by andy_t_roo · · Score: 1

      yeah, the problems people have with other people trying to give you the video w/o actually giving you the video. (ps, does anyone have a tool to get a video wrapped in a swf file?)

    2. Re:Please no more embedded movies by aichpvee · · Score: 1

      You sure you've upgraded to the final Flash Player 9 for Linux? Since the final release I haven't had any problems, though before that it constantly crashed. You might also look into the flashblock extension for Firefox. It blocks the flash but lets you click on it to view if you want. Pretty handy, especially when I have to use the laptop with only 256mb that otherwise gets killed by sites with tons of youtube (or similar) embedded videos.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
  23. democratic wins by Ep0xi · · Score: 0

    i accept donations too. by paypal, that would be democratic for the software industry as well as humanitarian for the wealth of mankind

    Don't send spamm to my email, just real donations thanks :))

    --
    ?
  24. Good luck to them by simong · · Score: 1

    One of Democracy's strengths has been their communication and seemingly ability to develop the app on nothing, so this donation should be a massive boost. On the downside I've tried to use it to replace VLC on the Mac Mini under my TV and while it handles downloaded video pretty well it struggles with my existing library (about 150Gb). Then again I haven't found anything that manages really well so maybe I'm just being picky. It's a new technology and I hope that Democracy will do well enough to compete.

  25. Eh? Just what is Mozilla Foundation for now? by AaronLawrence · · Score: 1

    Stupidly , I was under the impression that Mozilla foundation exists in order to develop Mozilla products.
    Not to give money away to random "worthy" projects.

    --
    For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
    1. Re:Eh? Just what is Mozilla Foundation for now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      RTFA

      -- and it's based on Mozilla technology.
  26. Re: Then include charged-for content by cyclomedia · · Score: 1

    I've been thinking about this for the past week, how to get studios and non geeks to switch over to pure internet TV? All it needs is a "channel" to be an RSS-like XML list of links to media files (and links to other channels).

    You could allow a link to a PNG (of a fixed size) for each link so you can nice purty on-screen listings.

    Because it's all open XML you can mashup your own "channels" of your favourite programs

    throw in "radio" support

    Do all the requests over HTTP. And allow users to store their credit-card / paypal / $other on their own computer / set-top-box (protected from the kids by a 4-digit pin) and have the system set up so that once a user has chosen a bunch of pay-programms to download (lets call that "recording") or to view straight away ("playing") is for their box to connect to each linked pay server via HTTPS and then send the pay info in a POST request.[*]

    bish bash bosh, you get an authorised download URL

    tag geo coordinates to everything and allow content providers to set up mirror servers and redirect you to those to help aleviate the lack of p2p.

    have standard codecs for each media type, H.264 and OGG should do for the time being.

    So let's review the technology needed: HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,PNG,OGG,H.264,XML

    Thus (bandwidth permitting) true open, cross-platform, cross-device internet tv can be born by the end of the weekend. If anyone can be bothered speccing it up.

    [*] The beauty of all this is that if you choose to "record" 1 free program, 1 pay fox program, 2 pay Paramount programs and 1 pay $otherStudio program you do in your living room is enter the pin for their chosen billing account once. the rest is done for them.

    --
    If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
  27. Mozilla Summer Of Code? by egghat · · Score: 1

    I've written this before and I will write it again ...

    I think that a Mozilla Summer of Code would be a good idea.

    And the Mozilla Foundation should really put their money behind XULRunner. It's one of the oldest solutions that utilizes XML + Scripting on the desktop. But I "fear" that similiar technologies from Adobe (Apollo) and Microsoft (Quicksilver) will take the market by storm.

    Bye egghat

    --
    -- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
    1. Re:Mozilla Summer Of Code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree on xulrunner

  28. bleh. by Stumbles · · Score: 1

    Well I hope they spend some of that 100K to make the friggin thing compatible with Python-2.5.

    --
    My karma is not a Chameleon.
  29. svn does run on feisty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    democracy in svn runs fine on feisty

    blog post:
    http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/04/feisty-su pport-on-the-way/
    how to get/build from svn:
    https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/demo cracy/wiki/GTKX11BuildDocs

    [AC because having an account here would encourage me to post more]

  30. I couldn't donate that! by webmonkey44 · · Score: 1

    Mozilla Foundation must have a bit of money