Miro

If there is one media product that Nomad has found that he likes then it is Miro.

Miro is developed by a non profit organisation based in Massachusetts called the Participatory Culture Forum. In thier own words the mission is "to create a more open and democratic video space." In other words they dont want Apple taking over the world and look to provide an alternative to iTunes.

For my money Miro is far more intuitive and easy to use than iTunes. It takes about 10 seconds to work out how to drive Miro whereas I am still struggling with iTunes. The best thing about Miro is that it is free to download. However those nice people at PCF deserve your support so consider adopting a line of code at $4 US a month. It is a whole lot cheaper than subsidising 'the corporation'.

Miro does have some bugs but you can download updates for free and the current version (2.0.4) seems pretty stable. I leave it running continuously on my machine and have not had to restart it for 3 weeks or so now. The last time I had problems, it appears to have been due to my inadvertently running 2 instances of Miro.

Miro comes complete with "The Miro Guide". This is actually a web page which is constantly updated with the latest feeds to become available. They seem to be fairly strict in deleting anything which might be construed as pornography. This will obviously disappoint some people; however I think it makes sense to deny critics easy ammunition. Bypassing the mainstream media obviously encourages freedom of expression but failing to have any values will not make the world a better place.

The major gripe I have with Miro is that some of the feeds fill up rapidly. The Sky news headlines for example are updated 4 times a day. After a month this results in a lot of files. Since I have little interest in looking at last weeks news I would just like them cleaned out. Unfortunately this needs to be done manually. A feature to delete everything over a week old would be very useful. Obviously this needs to be selectable for each feed as some feeds only provide new items once a week and I may want to watch the edition that came out while I was on holiday. If you agree with me then please log in to the bugzilla system at Miro and vote for bug 9784.

The major factor behind the creation of Miro is that broadcast television in the US is very low quality. The NTSC standard (derided as Never The Same Colour) has only 525 lines. Unlike the UK where you get all the channels from a single mast; every station runs its own transmitter. Adjusting your antenna for an optimum picture is not easy if it has to be done for 20 stations. Of course Obama has promised to fix this and will provide digital TV once he has finished closing Guantanamo and curing cancer, etc. In the meantime the internet is being seen as a way of providing HDTV in the US. However Miro say that they now have more users in Europe than in North America.

The question worth asking then is this: if there is an open source application like Miro available, why has every broadcaster in the UK decided to launch its own platform?. Why do we have iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD and Sky Player? It seems to me that download on demand will eventually move to a common platform (or platforms) with an open source interface. The RSS podcast interface is likely to be that standard. Surely 'the corporation' as a publicly funded body should be supporting an open standard and not trying to carve up the market with its own proprietary version? A couple of years ago 'the corporation' ran a trial of video podcasting. Why did they give up? My suspicion is that iPlayer is designed not to support open standards so that licence restrictions can be imposed on it at some point.

http://www.getmiro.com/