More on Miro

So, you'll probably have noted my fondness for Miro if you've read any of my previous entries. Well, they've just released version 1.0, so I thought it'd be a good time to talk about it some more!

So, I've mentioned before that Miro is more than just a media player. The idea behind it is that it works on RSS feeds, so it allows you to keep up when content becomes available and then Miro will download things automatically (if you wish). This is great for things like video and audio podcasts, a lot of which can be accessed via the Miro guide which is built into the player.

Another place you can get feeds is tvrss.net, where you can get RSS feeds of available torrent downloads for various TV shows, which can then be downloaded using Miro's built-in torrent features!

I now have feeds set-up that tell me when a new episode of Heroes or Bones is available, so I never have to worry about remembering which is on which day or if the show is off air for a week (stuff I'd have to actively find out as they air on American TV).

TED Talks

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader."

So, a while back, I introduced Miro (formerly Democracy player), which allows you to watch video podcasts as channels. When you first install Miro, it comes with a few subscriptions loaded by default. One of these is "TED talks", which is videos of various talks/performances given at the annual TED conference. They involve all kinds of things ranging from technology to language to music to psychology to pretty much anything you can think of that's on the cutting edge of creative and innovative thinking.

I highly recommend checking it out as there's some extremely interesting stuff on there. Even if none of the things cover your field of interest, I'm sure you'll find the talks interesting and some might even spark your interest about things you've never even thought about before (I do nothing to do with neuroscience but Vilayanur Ramachandran's talk was extremely interesting).

So, you can either get Miro or head to the TED talks site, here.

Who needs TV when you've got Democracy?

So, what do you do when there's nothing on TV? Maybe you don't even have a TV... Introducing Democracy Player:

Democracy is basically a video player, but it can do a lot more than that. It comes with a built-in channel guide that lets you connect to sort of Internet TV channels (basically just Video podacasts). This means rather than having to go to each individual webpage and download each video, Democracy does everything for you. You can also set it up to automatically download new videos. This means you can leave Democracy running and whenever you fancy watching something you'll find a couple of new videos downloaded!

There's channels about pretty much everything, a couple of my favourites are Pulp Secret and Fresh ink (both comics related), Rock and Roll TV (interviews, features and video clips of various rock bands, some underground, some quite big), The Cooking Show (two drunk Australian guys cook random stuff), Ask a ninja and The Onion News Network. There's also a couple of music tech channels available in the form of Music Tools and The Audio Dojo.

Just head over to www.getdemocracy.com/ and check it out.

Just a note: In a little while Democracy will be changing its name to Miro.