Miro (free, open source internet tv and video player)
Today on digg I spotted an article about a software program called Miro. From what I could tell it works something like a TiVo, but lets you search and download video from lots of different sources. I have tried a similar program called Joost but the interface for Joost was really odd and I didn't like the way it worked. Miro has many more features and channels, is still free, open source actually, and seems much better to me. I watched some interesting shows with it this evening. Diggnation is one of the shows they have listed. I saw a listing for channel102 which is awesome. Hopefully someone will set up channel101 videos to be available through Miro too. A lot of those channel101 and 102 shows are so entertaining. I really enjoy the idea behind them. Anyway, I am very impressed with Miro and I will be keeping my eye on that project to see how it progresses. The only problem I saw with it was that the fast forwarding and rewinding of videos didn't seem to work correctly. I eventually found that in order to fast forward and rewind videos I can use the scroll section of my touch pad on my laptop to make it work. I hope this will be fixed soon to function in the same way as all the other video players out there - and allow normal mouse drag movements to change current point of playback of the video.
(Above: Miro video position/fast forward/rewind thing.)
Update: 11/16/2007 - The problem with the fast forward and rewind seems to have cleared up. Either the software auto-updated itself with a fix or a reboot was required to get things straighted out. I noticed that it was working correctly after I had rebooted - so maybe that had something to do with it. Hopefully, you will not have to worry about this little Miro bug. On a side note - check out TV Show BitTorrent Downloading Made Easy With Miro.
Update: 11/19/2007 - The fast forward problem is still an issue and the reason I thought it had cleared up was that it seems to only affect videos that come from YouTube. So I suppose that stopped noticing it when I started looking at more non-YouTube videos. Videos that don't come from YouTube seem to not suffer from the bug. Also, I have changed my opinion about Joost. Joost is pretty cool because it has some good shows that you can't get on Miro without using 'less than ethical' means (tvrss.com).
