Miro
I recently started using an open source internet video player called Miro (www.getmiro.com), and I have to say so far I’m pretty impressed. Out of the box it starts you off with an extensive channel guide that lets you browse and search from a huge list of internet video feeds and podcasts. It allows you to subscribe to any rss feed of your choosing, plus it has built-in support for aggregate searching of popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video. You can even create custom channels that are based off of search phrases, which means that it will automatically find any new videos related to your search. Pretty nifty…
What sets Miro apart from just viewing the videos in your web browser, however, is that it saves a copy of the video files to your hard drive so you can keep them around for later viewing. This has come in handy when they take videos down off of YouTube for being copyright protected, offensive, etc. By default any videos that you watch will automatically be deleted after a few days to help keep room for new content, but you can always choose to save any specific videos that you like for an indefinite period of time.
Once you’re subscribed to a bunch of video feeds, it really can start to replace the standard television experience because you can just come home from work and have a whole set of shows ready to watch. While you’re gone it’s consistently monitoring the feeds for updates so that you get new videos as soon as they become available.
But I have to say, where I really see Miro having potential is that it now natively supports Bit Torrent, meaning that you can subscribe to any rss feed of video torrents and it will manage the downloading and seeding of the video (which is configurable). When used in conjunction with a site like tvrss.net, one could potentially subscribe to feeds of regular broadcast TV shows and in theory watch their favorite shows “on demand”. However, I’m sure one wouldn’t condone this activity.
Anyway, just wanted to pass this along to anyone else interested. Check it out if your curious, and be sure let me know if you have success with it.