Miro 2.0 Launches Today

soDean writes "Miro just launched their 2.0 release today. The free and open source HD video player and Internet TV features an all-new interface and an entirely rewritten UI engine, plus tons of new features and improvements — it's less of a collection of new stuff and more of a rethinking of the whole experience. You can download Miro 2.0 here for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Miro is developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, hell-bent on making Internet video more open and decentralized, along with a dedicated community of users, volunteers, translators, testers, and coders."

Comments

Nice, BUT

[WindBourne]

You also need to focus on the PUBLISH side. In particular, I would push a publisher for Musicians. Make it compete against MTV, etc.

Re:Nice, BUT

[moteyalpha]

I just installed this a few hours ago and it is a nice interface. The variety of what is free to download is amazing and they did a good job on making the interface intuitive. It will be a nice place for me to publish blender animation products and video tutorials of all kinds. Blender has a great tutorial on making tutorials and videos.

Re:Nice, BUT

[drDugan]

There does need to be a push for publishers to adopt these technologies. Most traditional media outlets do not see how well this can work, and refuse to admit the technology is already robust and available, and better for the consumer than broadcast TV.

New publishing services do exist: LegalTorrents.com (one of the default sidebar items in Miro) and focuses entirely on the publishing side. (Disclaimer: I work on LegalTorrents) - and there are many others too that work well with Miro.

LegalTorrents is an online digital media community to discover and distribute high quality open-licensed digital media. Each Content Creator on the site has an RSS feed that integrates automatically with Miro. (Sidebar -> Add Feed) The real benefit here is that Miro will download and share new content in the background automatically from each feed, and you can watch/listen whenever you want.

Miro + ???

[bornagainpenguin]

The last time I tried Miro it installed something called "OpenCandy" on my system without my permission. I think I'll pass until the Miro developers realize who owns this computer....HINT: Me, not them, not opencandy, or whatever else wants to piggyback with the installer.

--bornagainpenguin

Re:Miro + ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I uninstalled Miro last time because of its bad manners. It made connections to servers without me asking.

It also didn't have a loop function. WTF?

This time I got Skype spammed as soon as I opened the application. Coincidence? Four Skype spams in three years?

Looks like it's going in the bin again.

HULU?

[owlnation]

I notice they mention sites like Hulu and CBS on their site, but I assume this is only available to US residents? They cunningly don't mention any restrictions.

Have they got round this, or is this content still blacked out for most of the world?

Freedom is still better than non-freedom.

[jbn-o]

I understand and concur about not wanting programs to install stuff you don't want, but I thought I'd mention that this is not as bad as having proprietary software do something similar. With proprietary software you have no option to edit anything to make it work as you wish, or get it edited for you by someone you trust. With FLOSS that option exists even if you choose not to take advantage of it. FLOSS actually respects your ownership by giving you everything you need to make the program behave as you wish. Proprietary software does not respect your position that you own and should control your computer. Whether you are willing to leverage software freedom to your fullest benefit is a completely different issue that is entirely in your control.

As it so happens, the Miro team is a pretty nice and responsive bunch of people so I don't think you'll find Miro doing something so unexpected now.

miro, a pretty neat idea

[jollyreaper]

It also tries to integrate your torrent downloads so that you can track them from Miro as well.

I'm running this on a mac and it appears that there's still not yet a proper solution for a torrent client with RSS. UTorrent was recently released for mac but it lacks many key features of the Windows client such as the RSS feed. http://tvrss.net/ seems to be a good, clean torrent feed and you can key in search terms to make sure you're only getting one provider of the show at a time. Will probably work great on Windows.

I'm a recent mac convert and am surprised to read other mac heads saying they preferred running windows torrent programs under wine or in xp under parallels rather than deal with the sucky offerings for mac clients.

I use RSSOwl + BitTyrant + WMP

[Anonymous Coward]

I add the ATOM or RSS feed in RSSOwl, let BitTyrant open up the incoming torrents and open the result in whatever is associated with the file, usually this will be Windows Media Player (I tried several others, but I have to give MS a thumbs up on the design of WMP's interface). The only thing that could be made (slightly) more supple is to have RSSOwl automatically open torrents instead of requiring a click from me. But otherwise its pretty painless, and I don't see how having another application (especially one as heavyweight as Miro) for this purpose can be a good thing.