Miro, the manager and player for internet videos, torrents, and podcasts, has been around for a while, formerly known as Democracy Player and DTV. Miro comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation which has had another one of its projects, Universal Subtitles, featured on 404 Tech Support before. Miro is a free video downloader, player, and organizer. In a nutshell, it just makes everything related to internet videos easier and keeping up with new releases possible.
Miro is available for Mac OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, and other Linux distros. To begin using Miro, download the 38MB installer (Windows size) from getMiro.com/download and run through the installer process. My only dislike of Miro comes from the installation. It comes bundled with the Bing toolbar and it’s actually kind of pushy about the bloatware.
Once you have Miro installed, you have a complex, yet capable piece of software that can open your world to new entertainment options and make keeping track of other videos easier. My experience with Miro just barely scratches the surface. One of my main motivations was to find if television shows that I wanted to watch but couldn’t get through my cable provider were available for streaming online. For best experience, Miro needs Adobe Flash player for plugin browsers, which you can download DLM-free here.
Like I said, Miro is a complicated piece of software and to get it to do what you want can take some studying. Fortunately, it comes with a User Manual for such things as downloading an item from video search.
To highlight just two of the features that I really like from Miro are its ability to auto-download new items from a video feed and the ability to right-click and convert a video to more mobile-friendly formats.
There’s a lot more to it and I haven’t even touched on the torrenting aspect of Miro but it’s definitely a tool to have if you’re looking to find more formal videos online and search all in one place. Check out Miro if watching Internet videos is a hobby of yours.