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Miro Turns 1.0
nicholasreville writes "We have just released version 1.0 of our internet video application Miro. Miro is a free and open-source (GPL) RSS aggregator and video player with BitTorrent support and a built-in guide of video feeds. It's created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is devoted to making online video more open and has received grants from Mozilla and Mitch Kapor, among others. In contrast to closed, proprietary delivery systems, Miro embraces open standards and DRM-free video. We build this software because we think it's absolutely crucial that internet video have an open technology foundation. We don't need more gatekeepers. Miro was featured previously on Slashdot."
When using the Democracy Player, I could not find any content worth watching. Just garbage.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Looks cool - I'll keep checking back to see when 1.0 binaries are available for Fedora. Hopefully soon.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
When Miro has editing capabilities, it'll truly be remarkable considering all applications like that are mostly closed-source.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
http://www.miro.com/ displays
and Miro Video Editing soft/hardware from Pinnacle, now owned by Avid such as the
Pinnacle Systems miroVIDEO DV300 FireWire/SCSI Adapter Board
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
In the process of recently setting up an HTPC I have tried a number of different softwares and frontends to try to get an integrated media environment, with limited success. My experience with Miro, in particular, was not too great. I found that it's torrent downloading was erratic, bandwidth throttling was impossible, and most importantly, with Miro running in the background, VLC player (Miro also uses VLC to show video) encountered a number of problems that created audio and video artifacts in whatever I was watching. This could only be soved by shutting down Miro and relaunching my video. Ultimately I uninstalled Miro and am happily using Azureus with the RSS Feed Scanner plugin to automate tv downloads using tvrss.net feeds. The only downside to this is not having listings showing me what I've already watched and what is new.... but I can live with that.
--Scavenger-- http://www.playdecay.com Online gaming the old fashioned way.
I like Miro well enough. I use it under Ubuntu and it does a pretty good job. My one complaint would be dupes, as in downloading 'new' copies of programs you already have, which is kind of funny because aside from the fact that the file really is new (just a new version of an existing torrent) Miro does a nice job of displaying the program name and episode title correctly (it just doesn't seem to use this information to figure out that it already has a copy of SHOW NAME, SHOW TITLE). Is this fixed in the most recent release? Or am I missing something?
The nice thing about Miro is the exposure I get to net series I might not notice otherwise. Some reasonably entertaining stuff and Miro is a nice platform to view it on (of course the RSS is what hooked me).
Quack, quack.
The concept of Miro is appealing: having videos you are interested in download automatically and have them available for watching. Miro tries to do this. The problem is that it is a mediocre feed reader; a mediocre bittorrent client and a mediocre media player. Consequently it is not replacing any of these on my machine.
Unfortunately there is lots of rough edges that are known but not addressed in this 1.0 release. For example, Miro hogs bandwidth on my PC. Because it is hogging bandwidth, forget about doing things like browsing the web or accessing the miro guide when it is running. In other words, it renders the connection unusable. Most p2p clients have options to configure and constrain upload and download bandwidth capacity. I've never used a p2p application that worked without providing reasonable settings for such options (like a few kilobytes below the max capacity for upload and download to prevent being throttled by the ISP router). Miro lacks these options. I have a ordinary cable internet connection similar to what most home users would have, nothing special. So likely this affects most users.
Additionally, I don't like the built in media player. VLC is nice if you can configure it properly but that is not possible with the options screen in Miro. There's no option to launch video in an external media player.
Finally, many options default to rather annoying settings. For example subscribing to a feed results in Miro automatically downloading all new items in that feed. That just sucks unless you subscribe to only a handful of feeds. Basically it results in the automatic downloading of stuff you'll never watch and the delaying of downloads that you might actually want to watch. Additionally no way to prioritize here of course.
Altogether this feels like a premature release. They should have spent a bit more time polishing and fixing obvious issues.
Jilles
One of the 0.9.x series had a serious dupe problem. It was fixed a little while later.
These days only problems left are the usability snafus and frequent crashing.
I've included Democracy Player in KnoppMyth for some time. The next release will have Miro. It is nice to see them hit 1.0! My only issue is the interface isn't remote friendly.
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
It really needs to be able to actually play videos better. Many non-HD videos look very pixellated playing Miro, whereas they look smooth as butter playing in Media Player Classic. Since MPC is open source nowadays, why can't the Miro devs incorporate its video-playing capabilities into Miro?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I really like the concept of Miro/DemocracyPlayer, but I found the software largely unusable on both Linux and OS X in practice: it's just flaky and locks up during playback and/or downloading.
Miro has quite a messy interface.
... ...
Is there an alternative that looks more like a TV?
The interface would be:
Interface 1: Basic.
Channel Up/Down.
Pause/Play, FF, RR, Next, Prev, Stop.
Interface 2: Multichannel view.
Interface 3: Channel Edit.
Define groups of feeds that form a "channel".
Define display filter: Resolution >= 640x480, Aspect:Ratio >= 16:9,
Define content keyword filter: Priorities: documentaries=77 music,rock=66, comedy=55,
I can envision what the TV replacement is. Miro is not that.
-- Steve Ballmer
My blog
Used the previous release (0.9 something) for few weeks and stumbled upon few big issues for me:
..
- It eats up quite alot of cpu. I don't have the fastest of the bunch (1.4GHz amd something/1GB mem) but somehow it manages to eat up alot of juice compared to running something like VLC and normal torrent app. And when the cpu usage got up, audio sync problems.
- Also, downloading episodes that where queued automatically wasnt restricted by configuration option. Like, in config, one could add option to download 2 vids at once.. but it was still downloading 5 of "autodownloaded" ones and 2 "manually added" ones..
- VLC as a playback back-end only supported in windows, not in linux -> codec hell. Defaults to use gstreamer which wasnt the best option cpu wise either.. Some docs mentioned there's different backend for linux but it had to patched to the code..
- And last, atleast the linux side of the forums where quite unresponsive
But to be fair, i did like the idea of miro, i have tried other similar applications and out of the few i've tested, miro as a software was the most fun to use and sadly (for the others), only one working on in linux.
yush
a bittorrent client with a web "interface" is a terrible idea
Oh god, i just installed it and was really enthousiastic. The welcome session is quite good, but when you start to use it :(. It takes over your processor (i had to set the priority on 3), uses all your bandwidth, your memory and your nerves. Had it running for 5 minutes before i decided to uninstall it, what a deception !
Their site is very slow because it's been slashdotted. Perhaps one of the ways of distributing a Bittorrent client should be via Bittorrent.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
Does it still have a different look and feel on linux compared to windows and osx? Can it run at the same time as minefield yet?
Everything will be taken away from you.
I've had issues with Miro taking DAYS to download torrents that take a matter of hours with azureus. The built in client has some serious issues.
We considered "Miro 95" but then users wouldn't stop laughing.
From the article: "It's created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is devoted to making online video more open ... In contrast to closed, proprietary delivery systems, Miro embraces open standards and DRM-free video..."
... Get the Flash Player to see this player."
From the Miro web page: "How do I use Miro? This video gives a quick overview
What about the writer's strike that will cause reruns and crappy programming on for weeks? This should be a great chance for free and open projects to get a chance. The online media should be all over this. I'm surprised Taco hasn't make a section on Slashdot just for new media. It's a great chance to get close to a million people interested in something! The whole problem with online culture is that it's not tied to your locality, or social group unless you sit and IM people all day. Most old-school geeks don't really do that.
Is Miro completely pointless? I hadn't heard of it, and just downloaded it at a mere 12 kbps (maybe it was the /. effect).
It didn't seem to do anything more than what my Feed aggregator/browser already did. Nor did I find the "plays any video" tagline impressive. Don't most people already have MPC/Codec Packs/MPlayer/VLC do "play any video" on their computers? It didn't look like it showed me too many videos either, most of the default loaded channels had only one video.
In the world of RSS, Ajax-enable video websites, what does Miro do that my browser with a proper extension set, can't ?
Am I missing something here?
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Installed it. Ran it. Crashed it. Uninstalled it.
Nice concept. Crap implementation. I'll check back at v3.0 or maybe v4.
If you're running OS X the best application for this is TVShows (http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/). It uses launchd to check tvrss.net every so often so it is completely transparent when the GUI isn't running. It uses a ruby script to run through a xml file to determine which TV shows to grab.
You can have it download to a folder or have it start your torrent client automatically. Personally I use it with rtorrent and I see almost no CPU usage.
the build STILL borks! You'd think, at least I would with something that JUST RELEASED they would be USING THE CURRENT version of dependencies. Nope! Not these guys.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I could have sworn I was older than that, though...
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
I had absolutely no idea what Miro was, other than something involving RSS and VLC. OK, that's nice. But I downloaded it anyway on a lark and was blown away. Maybe it still needs polishing (although I haven't had any problems whatsoever, knock on wood), but this is a prime example of the whole exceeding the sum of the parts. Congratulations on a truly slick application!
BTW, thanks for changing the name. "Democracy Player" just screamed "hippie". Yeah, I know that's a dumb reason not to try something, but image counts for a lot even if it shouldn't.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Too bad it's not in Ubuntu repositories... :(
Oh wait, it is! Just it's 0.9.8.1 version! I guess I'll have to wait for an update then.
Really bummer it's GTK+ based though... KDE is a lot better IMHO, now it will just eat up my memory.
This application looks cool, but I can't find the content I'm looking for (French TV shows). I checked tvrss.net but it seems to have US programmes only.
Does anybody know a good source of RSS feeds for European/French shows?
Cheers,
ElGanzoLoco
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
In my living room, I have a Sharp Aquos flat-panel, with a Mac Mini (Power PC) running Leopard. Miro entertains the family most of the day.
I have some Folders set up that point to the MyWorldBook (cheap raid NAS) in the basement (which is hackable linux) This holds a large collection of feature movies, and more importantly, copies of all the DVDs that we own that my two year old wants to watch over and over. We have tons of Thomas the Tank engine, Go Diego Go, Kipper, etc.. ready for him to watch.
We use a bluetooth MightyMouse for a remote, and even my two year old can choose what he wants to watch next, and also (just last week!) click the button that makes it full-screen.
Next, I have some great RSS feeds, Webb Alert, NASA ESA space telescope news, NBC Nightly news, and some National Geographic. not to mention TED talks.
Finally, I have a few RSS feed based torrent downloads automated from tvrss. Even though I do get House on the television, one day later Miro has downloaded the HD version thanks to tvrss. I also download the Daily Show, Doctor Who, Psych, and a couple others.
I've only come across one movie that was so high resolution that the PowerPC based Mac Mini couldn't show it... it was some footage of very high resolution images taken from the Mars explorers.
So I think Miro is the best thing to happen to my living room.
I also love Miro under the hood. It's cross-platform, and on each platform it uses the best native platform tools that it can. On Windows it uses Mozilla XUL, on Linux it uses PyGTK, and on Mac it uses PyObjectiveC to get the best native interfaces on each platform. In effect it's three different applications, with lots of shared code, and only Python could make this sort of thing manageable by a small team that can subsist on $50,000 fundraisers.
It uses HTML for its guide and VLC for its video engine. Everything is in touch with the mainstream, and very nicely integrated.
I only have a couple of complaints. One is that sometimes if I play a widescreen movie, followed by a smaller movie, I can see the last still image of the widescreen in the upper left hand corner 'behind' the current movie. It also is pretty dumb about the movies on my network drive. If I start miro without first connecting to the NAS, Miro decides that all those movies have been deleted, and when I connect the NAS, all of them show up as new. There's no way to mark each movie as watched, so I end up watching the first 8 seconds of 60 movies to clean up the 'new' list. After about 35 movies, Miro will freeze and I'll have to Force Quit, then restart and finish up my cleaning.
All around, it's been done using the best possible methods (IMHO) and achieved a fantastically usable result.
Celebrate Excellence!
It includes exactly 0 lines of video decoding code which is the *real* PITA for programmers. So while ffmpeg developers spend years working on extremely complicated video codecs to provide open source (and very fast!) video decoding (nearly 100K lines of code), gsteamer steals the code, adds some artworks and gets the credits and the money.
I wonder if Miro which is a wrapper over gstreamer, which is a wrapper over ffmpeg, even mentions the proper CREDITS somewhere. Because in the website there is certainly no mention on the people who have done all the hard work.
Wow, you sound like one of our power users. Have you been in contact with any of the development team? If not, I think you could be a real resource for us.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Hi Dave,
I've been really tempted to send my resume in for the latest programmer position. I've done some Python + C++ work in the past, and really want to get back to that toolset.
The code I wrote extended wxWidgets Image with a filter-chain that was optimized with the Intel Performance Primitives. I had images from multiple research-grade high resolution live cameras, with interactive and real-time thresholding, colorization and other filters that could be added in for the task at hand. It was some of the best work I'd ever done, but it got shelved by a VP who didn't understand it.
I'll be in touch with the devel team soon. (I've just gotta get over the hump on my current contract!)
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!