Watch out Joost because here comes Miro! Some of you may have heard Miro mentioned quite a bit around the Web between yesterday and today, and that’s because it really is worth talking about it. Everybody wants to get their hands on the open-source, rather slick video player with thousands of unrestricted channels including HD content. Formerly known as Democracy, Miro 1.0 has launched and is available for download. All I can say is go get it, I think you’ll be impressed.
Here’s what you need to know about Miro: It’s been dubbed a Joost competitor, but once I tell you all of the advantages, I think you’ll agree that it’s really not a Joost competitor. There’s NO way Joost will be able to compete with this, and really, their goals are much different. First and foremost, Miro offers 2,500 unrestricted channels compared to the 250 that Joost offers — all of them with DRM. Miro offers HD content, Joost doesn’t offer any. Miro is open platform while Joost is closed. Another huge advantage is that they use VLC’s video engine. If you’re familiar with VLC, you know that it can play just about any video format known to man. The same goes for Miro.
In terms of funding, Joost is king of the hill – they’ve gotten all kinds of funding. In terms of what the people really want, Miro stands king of the hill, and hopefully they’ll get comparable funding to make their service even better. Did I mention that Miro connects you to video-sharing sites like YouTube? They do, how awesome is that? They also support BitTorrent, and their player is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux which is huge. Of course since it’s open-source, it only makes sense that they created a version for Linux.
Below are a few screenshots of Miro:
If you want to download it, I recommend going to FileHippo. Miro’s site is understandably slow right now with everybody trying to get their hands on it to give it a try. Once you try it, let us know what you think.
Sweeeeet.
I tried it. It crashes immediately after the browser info loads, every time.
Just expanding on my previous, profoundly deep comment (see above).
Seems really nice! I like it. I thought the YouTube videos were going to play in the built-in browser-like thing, but no, it actually downloaded them to my box. Only problem I had with that is my monitor is really big, and there was no way to tell Miro to play that tiny little YouTube video at normal or 200% size–I had to restore the window and resize it.
I love the geek content! Some of my favorites, such as TWiT and DL.tv (high-def) are in there. Looks like this is promising, interested to see where it goes.
I’m sure it’s just a bug that will get fixed, but I haven’t had any troubles like that.
When I first used it that’s what I thought it was going to do as well. The only disappointing thing with the YouTube search feature is that I can’t sort the results based on the number of views. That makes it a lot more difficult to find decent videos to watch when you’re searching.
Whole channels thing sounds like podcasts. I have those in Zune software now, and w/ that they’re auto-added to my device.
Ashley, thanks for the great coverage and review.
As a project still under development it only stands to reason that people will sporadically have problems with Miro (the same is true for Firefox and other OS projects).
On the off-chance you do encounter a bug, why not help out and log it at [develop.participatoryculture.org] ?
BinaryMuse, if you want to stay up to date with the latest Miro developments you may want to consider subscribing to our blog at [getmiro.com]