Miro, the free open-source video player, has reached 1.0 and launched a spiffy player for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Drop what you’re doing and go get it.
Miro is that good.
Miro is an alternative to Joost, Windows Media, and iTunes for downloading, watching, and organizing your video. We wrote on it extensively in July, and since then it has improved even more.
Its advantages are listed on the Miro Website, but to summarize:
- It’s open-source
- It’s DRM-free
- It’s friendly to all content creators, professional and user-generated alike
- It’s high definition
- It’s BitTorrent enabled
- It has 2,700 channels listed in the Miro Guide
- Of those 2,700, about 200 are from commercial broadcasters
- It connects you to all the video-sharing sites like YouTube
- Miro uses the VLC video engine to play nearly every video format known to man
And so on.
Contrast Miro with Joost, which is proprietary, DRM-addled, not available to video-sharing sites, streaming, lacking as much content, and not friendly to older power PC-based Macs, although its professional content is tough to beat.
The Miro player is extremely easy to use to find new content, download it, play it, organize it, and share it.
As Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing notes, “Thanksgiving is coming, and many of us will be heading back home to our parents’ place for the holidays. Now would be a great time to install Miro on your folks’ computer and subscribe them to a couple of great channels.”
Excellent idea. Only my folks will have to wait until Christmas.
