Miro (formerly named Democracy Player or DTV) was an

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...

video player Media player software is a type of application software for playing multimedia computer files like audio and video files. Media players commonly display standard media control icons known from physical devices such as tape recorders and CD play ...

and

Internet television Streaming television is the digital distribution of television content, such as TV shows, as streaming media delivered over the Internet. Streaming television stands in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by over-the-air a ...

application developed by the

Participatory Culture Foundation The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to "enable and support independent, non-corporate creativity and political engagement." Its primary project is a free and open-source software Int ...

. It runs on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and supports most known video file formats. It offers both audio and video, some in HD quality. The Participatory Culture Foundation no longer develops Miro. The last version (6.0) was released in 2013 and is no longer functioning correctly because of changes to the YouTube API. Miro is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

, released under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later.

Features

Miro can automatically download videos from RSS-based "channels", manage them and play them. The application is designed to mesh with other

(PCF) products such as

Video Bomb Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...

, a

social tagging Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...

video website, and the Channel Channel, a

TV guide TV Guide is an American digital media company that provides television program Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or t ...

for Internet television. Miro integrates an

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, podc ...

and

podcatcher A podcast client, or podcatcher, is a computer program used to stream or download podcasts, usually via an RSS or XML feed. While podcast clients are best known for streaming and downloading podcasts, many are also capable of downloading video ...

, a

BitTorrent client The following is a general comparison of BitTorrent clients, which are computer programs designed for peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. The BitTorrent protocol coordinates segmented file transfer among peers connected i ...

(based on

libtorrent libtorrent is an open-source implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. It is written in and has its main library interface in C++. Its most notable features are support for Mainline DHT, IPv6, HTTP seeds and μTorrent's peer exchange. libtor ...

), and a media player (

VLC media player VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desk ...

under Windows,

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

under

, and

xine xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries ...

media player or

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, ...

under Linux and FreeBSD). Since 2.0, Miro supports the adding of website bookmarks under the "Sites" category; by default, ''ClearBits.net'' is preloaded in Miro as a bookmark. Examples of supported video files are

Windows Media Video Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

(WMV),

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...

Audio Video Interleave Audio Video Interleave (also Audio Video Interleaved and known by its initials and filename extension AVI, usually pronounced ), is a proprietary multimedia container format and Windows standard introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part ...

(AVI), XVID as a video player. It also supports RSS BitTorrent. When a new video is available, the program will notify and download if possible. The Miro Video Converter converts video formats. It is based on FFmpeg with profiles for the Theora (.ogv),

.mp4 MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streami ...

, and WebM video formats supported by various devices. A developer of Miro wrote that the Windows installer installs proprietary commercial software such as browser add-ons, also known as crapware, stating "This is one of the primary ways we fund continued Miro development."

History

The application was first launched in 2005 as Democracy Player (sometimes abbreviated as DTV) and later on as Miro in 2007. Video searching of web-based video archives was included in 2007, with access to various archives changing over time. Miro is mostly written in Python, although it links to various libraries written in a variety of languages. Versions through 2.x had an almost entirely HTML/

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

based UI. Miro uses embedded WebKit in a GTK window on Unix/Linux (Mozilla Gecko/XUL until 3.0.2), WebKit in a Cocoa window on macOS, and Mozilla in a XUL window on Windows. Since version 3.0, the macOS port uses Cocoa and others use GTK. The embedded web browser is used only for web pages.

Reception

Miro received a favorable review from

Josh Quittner Josh Quittner (born February 12, 1957) is an American journalist. Quittner is CEO of Decrypt Media, a leading independent publication covering the world of Web 3.0, cryptocurrency, NFTs and more. Born in Manhattan, Quittner grew up in Reading, ...

who wrote "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called Miro." In May 2011, Seth Rosenblatt of

CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

wrote, "Providing one-stop shopping for all your video and audio management desires, open-source and cross-platform Miro deserves much of the praise that's been heaped upon it." The Softonic review gave the software a score of 9/10, and described the software as "a perfect example of how video content from different sources can be integrated into one single application and served directly to your PC in a fast, easy and elegant way."

References

External links

*
Democracy Player is dead, long live Miro - last100, 17 July 2007

* ttp://reviews.cnet.com/4660-10621_7-6743226.html?tag=vid.1 CNET Video Review of Democracy Player - Dated
Groklaw interview with Nicholas Reville
February 2008 {{BitTorrent Internet television software Free media players Windows media players Linux media players MacOS media players Free BitTorrent clients Free software programmed in Python 2006 software Video software that uses GTK File sharing software that uses GTK BitTorrent clients for Linux

Features

History

Reception

See also

References

External links