Democracy Player Receives $100K Grant From Mozilla

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.'"

Comments

well damn

[Anonymous Coward]

That tops my donation of $5.

Sounds great!

[jshriverWVU]

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.

Re:Great package needs more content

[Anonymous Coward]

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

My suggestions for Democracy Player:

[Stormx2]

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 (:

Re:My suggestions for Democracy Player:

[vunzzz]

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

Re:First things first

[xENoLocO]

They keep forgetting.

Re:Great package needs more content

[bshensky]

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.