Miro (formerly named Democracy Player or DTV) is 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 and

Internet television Streaming television is the digital distribution of television content, such as films and television show, television series, Streaming media, streamed over the Internet. Standing in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by Broadc ...

application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It runs on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

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, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, 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 Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) products such as Video Bomb, a social tagging video website, and the Channel Channel, a

TV guide TV Guide is an American digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, vi ...

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 ...

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital Content (media), content such as online newsp ...

and podcatcher, a

BitTorrent client The following is a general comparison of Glossary of BitTorrent terms#Client, BitTorrent clients, which are computer programs designed for peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent, BitTorrent protocol. The BitTorrent protocol coordinates se ...

(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) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source, software portability, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media Server (computing), server developed by the Vide ...

under Windows,

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

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 fr ...

media player or

GStreamer GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), 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 f ...

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 technolog ...

(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 p ...

(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 FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

with profiles for the

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

(.ogv), .mp4, and

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

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 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

/ CSS 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 Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

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 who wrote "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called Miro." 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." The

Softonic Softonic is a Spanish software download platform that distributes, categorizes, and evaluates programs for Windows, Android, and Mac. The platform was founded in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, in June 1997. History Softonic started in 1997 as a ...

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

* ttps://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