Miro (formerly named Democracy Player or DTV)[2] is an Internet television application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux and supports most known video file formats. It offers both audio and video, some in HD quality.
Miro is free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.[3]
Features
Miro can automatically download videos from RSS-based “channels”, manage them and play them. The application is designed to mesh with other Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) products such as Video Bomb, a social tagging video website, and the Channel Channel, a TV guide for Internet television.
Miro integrates an RSS news aggregator and podcatcher, a BitTorrent client (based on libtorrent), and a media player (VLC media player under Windows, QuickTime under Mac OS X, and xine media player or GStreamer under GNU/Linux). 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 QuickTime, Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG, Audio Video Interleave (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.[4] It is based on FFmpeg with profiles for the Theora (.ogv), .mp4, and WebM video formats supported by various devices.[5]
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 based UI. Miro uses embedded WebKit in a GTK window on Linux (Mozilla Gecko/XUL until 3.0.2), WebKit in a Cocoa window on OS X, and Mozilla in a XUL window on Windows. Since version 3.0, the Windows and Linux ports use GTK and the OS X port uses Cocoa. The embedded web browser is used only for web pages.
Version history
| Release | Date | Features |
|---|
| Democracy Player 0.8 | February 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.1 | March 9, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.1a | March 22, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.2 | April 16, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.4.1 | June 23, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.5 | July 20, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.5.2 | July 25, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.8.5.3 | August 4, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.0 | September 11, 2006 | |
| Democracy 0.9.0.1 | September 16, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.0.2 | September 22, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.1 | October 19, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.2.1 | November 27, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.2.2 | December 30, 2006 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.5 | February 13, 2007 | Interface refinements and an update to VLC Player 0.8.6. |
| Democracy Player 0.9.5.1 | February 21, 2007 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.5.3 | March 19, 2007 | |
| Democracy Player 0.9.6 (Miro RC1) | June 4, 2007 | Adds a "folder watching" feature, the ability to resume playback, and the ability to minimize to the system tray. |
| Democracy Player 0.9.8 | July 18, 2007 | |
| Miro 0.9.8.1 (RC2) | July 30, 2007 | Name change, Veoh search engine, and Windows system-tray functionality improvements. |
| Miro 0.9.9 | September 4, 2007 | |
| Miro 0.9.9.1 | September 6, 2007 | |
| Miro 0.9.9.9 (RC3) | October 31, 2007 | First-time user guide, generates thumbnails, remembers search terms, has permalinks for videos, and bug fixes. |
| Miro 1.0 | November 13, 2007 | Startup guide, permalinks, search-result memory, unicode-related error fix, better thumbnail generation, and delete while playing video. |
| Miro 1.1 | January 10, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2-rc1 | March 17, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2 | March 20, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.1 | March 27, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.2 | April 9, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.3 | April 23, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.4 | June 9, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.6 | August 2, 2008 | |
| Miro 1.2.8 | | |
| Miro 2.0 | February 10, 2009 | |
| Miro 2.0.3 | | |
| Miro 2.0.4 | | |
| Miro 2.5 | July 23, 2009 | |
| Miro 2.5.1 | | |
| Miro 2.5.2 | | |
| Miro 2.5.3 | | |
| Miro 2.5.4 | | |
| Miro 3.0 | March 25, 2010 | |
| Miro 3.0.1 | April 15, 2010 | |
| Miro 3.0.2 | May 24, 2010 | Linux version switches from gtkmozembed and XULRunner to WebKit |
| Miro 3.0.3 | July 26, 2010 | |
| Miro 3.5 | October 22, 2010 | Miro now remembers the previous selected view under Library and features the addition of new video conversion capabilities for a variety of devices. Users can now cancel all queued auto-downloads. |
| Miro 3.5.1 | December 6, 2010 | Minor bug fixes |
| Miro 4.0 | May 26, 2011[6] | Music manager and purchasing capabilities added.[7] |
Reception
A link to download Miro and Mozilla Firefox appeared on the front page of The Pirate Bay in July 2009 underneath a notice "We love free software."
Miro received a favorable review from Josh Quittner who wrote "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called Miro."[8] In May 2011, Seth Rosenblatt of CNET 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."[9] 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."[10]
See also
References
- ^ ftp.osuosl.org :: Oregon State University Open Source Lab, 07-Oct-2012 13:00, http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.or g/miro/src/, retrieved 2013.01.4 11:06
- ^ Nicholas Reville (12 March 2007). "A Name Change". http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2007/03/a -name-change/. Retrieved 2007-09-03.; Nicholas Reville (17 July 2007). "Announcing Miro". http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2007/07/a nnouning-miro/. Retrieved 2007-09-03.
- ^ "Get Miro download page". http://www.getmiro.com/download/. "...the software code, which is licensed under the GPL."
- ^ Miro Video Converter
- ^ "Miro Video Converter FFMPEG Conversion Matrix". Participatory Culture Foundation. 2011-04-08. https://develop.participatoryculture. org/index.php/ConversionMatrix. Retrieved 2011-10-11.
- ^ Lahey, Chris. archive/miro-releases "Participatory Culture Foundation's Launchpad page". https://launchpad.net/~pcf/ archive/miro-releases. Retrieved 2011-05-31. (Archived by WebCite® at webcitation.org)
- ^ Ryan, Paul. @Accessdate= 2011-05-31 "Hands on: Miro 4.0 offers music management, Android syncing". Ars Technica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/ne ws/2011/05/hands-on-miro-40-offers-mu sic-management-android-syncing.ars @Accessdate= 2011-05-31. (Archived by WebCite® at webcitation.org)
- ^ Quittner, Josh (November 13, 2007). "The future of Internet TV". TechLand blog. Fortune.CNN.com. http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com /2007/11/13/the-future-of-internet-tv /. Retrieved 2011-10-27. "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called called Miro."
- ^ Rosenblatt, Seth (May 25, 2011). "Miro - CNET Editors' review". CNet.com. http://download.cnet.com/Miro/3000-21 39_4-10587758.html. Retrieved 2011-10-27.
- ^ Santos, Elena (July 25, 2011). "Watch internet videos like you watch TV". Softonic. http://miro.en.softonic.com/. Retrieved 2011-10-27.
External links
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