Miro (software)

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Miro
Miro icon
Miro-0.9.9.png
Miro 0.9.9 running under Windows, showing the Miro guide in the main window.
Developer(s) Participatory Culture Foundation
Initial release 21 February 2006, 11:42 (2006-02-21T11:42) (0.8.0-rc4 = earliest known)
Stable release 2.5.4  (December 4, 2009; 2 month(s) ago (2009-12-04)[1]) [+/−]
Preview release SVN  (n/a) [+/−]
Written in Python using GTK
Operating system Cross-platform
Linux
Mac OS X
Microsoft Windows
Size ~2.0 MB (Linux)
15.28 MB (Mac OS X)
28.50 MB (Windows)
9.28 MB (Source code)
(all archived)
Available in More than 40 languages
Development status Active
Type Internet television
RSS+BitTorrent
Media player
License GNU GPL v2 or later/GNU LGPL/BSD license (free software)
Website getmiro.com

Miro (previously known as Democracy Player and DTV[2]) is an Internet television application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It is supported on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The program supports most known video files and offers sound and video, some in HD quality. The software is downloaded several million times a year.

Miro is free software released under the GNU General Public License.[3]

Contents

[edit] 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, a social tagging video website, and the Channel Channel, a TV guide for Internet television.

Miro integrates an RSS aggregator, 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 Linux). Since 2.0, Miro supports the adding of website bookmarks under the “Sites” category; by default, LegalTorrents.com is preloaded in Miro as a bookmark.

Examples of supported video files are QuickTime, WMV, MPEG, 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.

[edit] History

The application was first launched in 2005 as DTV, with the name being changed to Democracy Player in 2006 and Miro in 2007. Video searching of web-based video archives was included in 2007, although access to Veoh was dropped in 2007–2008 when Veoh adopted an incompatible API. In 2008, Miro switched from the XUL user interface used in many Mozilla-based applications to the gtkmozembed interface as part of efforts to streamline the rendering of the GUI.

[edit] 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."[4]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "ftp.osuosl.org :: Oregon State University Open Source Lab". Participatory Culture Foundation. 2009-12-04. http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/Miro/win/. Retrieved 2010-01-21. 
  2. ^ 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/announing-miro/. Retrieved 2007-09-03. 
  3. ^ "Get Miro download page". http://www.getmiro.com/download/. "...the software code, which is licensed under the GPL." 
  4. ^ "The future of Internet TV". http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/13/the-future-of-internet-tv/. "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called called Miro." 

[edit] External links