Miro is a tool to discover, subscribe to, and watch high definition video feeds. We’ve been using it for a month, and today we realized we’ve been using it more than Firefox. If you use Linux, and want to be entertained, you want Miro. Here’s why.

• It shows major media content like NBC news in HD, Comedy Central, and the Onion News Network
• It can play every type of video format
• It can fetch files either traditionally or via Bittorrent
• It has independent good stuff like WebbAlert (a five minute straight-dope update of tech happenings) and GigaOM. Because if anything will comfort us in these trying times, it’s Om Malik’s weirdly enigmatic smile
• It can find, show, and download anything from Google video, YouTube and Revver.
• It’s Open Source, packaged, and provides it own apt repository so you can update it at the same time as everything else
• It works.

Miro was born from the old DemocracyPlayer, but whereas DemocracyPlayer was all talk the last time we tried it, Miro’s all action.

It’s beta, but there’s been two whole bugs for the months I’ve used it: one minor glitch affecting screen redraw when scrolling, and a problem that required a once-off config file tweak to change the video engine.

As of today’s update, both those issues are resolved.

Ubuntu kids will need the ubuntu-restricted-extras package first, other distribution will need their equivalent codec pack.

Done? Now go download it already.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Desktop Linux, Web applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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