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

[buswolley]

I have one of thos einternet connections many just dream about..University BBone...ANyway, I got Miro and started to download content like a madman. 10-20 concurrent downloads all running at 1-10 megabit... It was great...

Then the university admins cut me down to 56k modem speed for 2 weeks to teach me a lesson.

Be careful with Miro. :P

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.

Build instructions

[ChienAndalu]

Since many distributions don't have it in their repositories yet, you might want to grab the source and build it yourself.

Re:Build instructions

[markdavis]

No, it is not for "OSX, Windows, and Ubuntu".

It is for "MacOS, MS-Windows, and Linux". There, fixed that for you.

Anyway, Miro is already in the repositories for Mandriva, SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Pardus... which probably covers about 95-98% of Linux users.

Problem with video players in Ubuntu

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I can't be alone in my problems with Ubuntu's media player. I installed Ubuntu in a VPC in order to be able to surf porn sites on my work computer and be undetectable in case someone tried to go through my cache. Things worked great except that I simply wasn't able to get video to work in the media player.

It's not the end of the world. I can of course download static images, but sometimes it's more enjoyable to see porn in motion.

Anyone else have the same problem? Does Miro solve this problem?

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]

It appears "OpenCandy" is only available for Windows, so I believe Microsoft owns your computer.

Re:Miro + ???

[oboreruhito]

OpenCandy was removed from Miro two months ago after user complaints.

Hi All,

We're going to remove OpenCandy from our installer next week. Thanks for pushing back on this.

We still think the core idea of open source projects promoting one another is a great one, and we'll continue to support and promote other FOSS projects whenever possible.

~Jesse

Also from that post:

OpenCandy is a a software recommendation engine that we added recently in order to suggest other free and open source software to our users. You can find out about the organization at www.opencandy.com.

I wasn't aware that it permanently left their recommendation engine on the user's machine after running it. We'll look into that right now and fix it as soon as possible.

Re:Ubuntu Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Awwww. Somebody is a sad salamander!

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?

BugZilla sucks!

[chill]

To any developers, please listen carefully.

From and end-user perspective, BugZilla is a complicated, confusing, steaming pile of shit!

As an end-user I shouldn't have to "create an account", "login" or anything else to report a damn bug. Especially from a link within the program itself. A brief bit of text outlining what makes up a good bug report is fine, but I shouldn't have to jump thru hoops just to say "X is broken, here is how to reproduce it, here is my config".

For other developers, it is fine. For end-users, it is a nightmare.

Re:BugZilla sucks!

[chill]

Click the "Report Bug" link in Miro and you'll see the connection. It opens a link to their BugZilla form, asking you to create an account or login.

Re:BugZilla sucks!

[chill]

I'm perfectly capable of entering a useful bug report, but BZ is a pain in the ass. If you ask for end-user help, then you need to accommodate end user methods without trying to pretend you can turn them into developers.

Re:BugZilla sucks!

[Kral_Blbec]

Not to mention it is still another pain in the ass to have to register for a service that I only intend to use once.

Re:BugZilla sucks!

[dkf]

Some open-source projects get all the bug reports they can handle despite the difficulty. Ease-of-use improvements in Bugzilla which increase the number of junk bugs reported by people who can't be bothered to put a little effort into it may not actually be helpful.

More of an issue is the fact that if you allow anonymous submissions, you tend to get a problem with spam. It's not generally difficult to deal with spam, but it does take time to triage and squelch.

OTOH, in the past I've fixed important bugs that were submitted anonymously and where I've never been able to identify after the fact who did the submission. I've also had some users mention to me that they never submit bug reports where they have to identify themselves in the process. Prohibiting anonymous submissions does mean that you miss out on some things.

On reflection, I'd suggest that only large should accept anonymous submissions, since that at least saves effort for things that are reported properly. Large projects have to decide for themselves whether they value anonymous reports or spam-freedom more; I'm in two minds about it, depending on whether I'm dealing with spam or bugs at the time. If you do allow anon submissions, make sure you've got a mailing list set up to track all changes in the bug DB, since that makes it much easier to see trouble...

Re:Hulu, Linux, Miro and Flash

[SlashdotOgre]

Well according tot the article, streaming flash only works in Windows & OSX, by your post title I presume you're running some form of Linux. The exact quote is, "You can add streaming sites like Hulu to your sidebar (note: streaming with Flash only works in Windows and OSX)".

This is unfortunate, although not a show stopper. Although it's probably coincidence I installed Windows in VirtualBox on my Gentoo based desktop just to stream Hulu to my Xbox 360 via PlayOn last night.

Anyone know of an open source Hulu streamer (ideally one that supports UPNP for Xbox 360/PS3 support)? I've been serving local content over UPNP via fuppes (using their SVN releases, works great on the 360), but I doubt they'll be implementing Hulu support any time soon.

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.

Re:Can I get Battlestar Galactica in HD on it?

[Fallingcow]

It heavily promotes a large number of legal video RSS feeds (many of them very good), however you can use any torrent (or direct download, I think) RSS feed you want with the program. So, find a BSG HD torrent RSS feed (I'm sure they exist several places) and you're good to go.

Hell-Bent

[Hadlock]

More organizations need the term "hell-bent on" in their mission statement.