Miro 2.5

Miro 2.5 is a good tool possessing desirable qualities in providing one-stop shopping for all your video needs, open-source and cross-platform Miro. The latest major point to version 2.0 continues to impress.

The concept is brilliant, yet simple: Create a video player that can subscribe to and download video podcasts while managing the videos you've saved on your hard drive. On the face of it, this might sound like iTunes, but the sharing component is an essential aspect of the program. Miro has always been geared toward video and it shows in the program's design.

When you launch the app, a left sidebar hosts a folder tree for managing your videos. The central pane does double duty for viewing videos and searching for new ones, although the latest version lets you pop out the viewing window so you can multitask your viewing and browsing. The bottom hosts a search box, for parsing through Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and others, a video control panel, and a volume control. Somewhat confusingly, there's also a search box at the top of the main window.

Features include full torrent support (so you can download and view torrents in the same app), folder watching (to manage only the hard-drive folders you specify for new videos), resumable playback, channel surfing (which organizes video feeds by topic), video sharing and hosting, and assistance in creating and distributing videos. The biggest changes in 2.0, though, are in the guts of the program; it loads faster and is immeasurably more stable than before.

Miro makes video on the Internet less frustrating and more enjoyable. You can subscribe to channels of Internet video, download videos, and watch them full screen, one after the other, all in one application. Internet video becomes Internet TV.

Major Features:

1. It can play almost any video file and offers over 6,000 free internet TV shows and video podcasts.
   • Miro has a simple, gorgeous interface designed for fullscreen HD video. Since Miro downloads most videos, you can take your shows with you, even on an airplane. Quite simply, Miro is a better way to watch all the video you care about.
   • Best of all, Miro is 100% free and open source, developed by a non-profit organization and volunteers around the world.
2. Unlike your browser, Miro's built for HD.
   
   • The built-in Miro Guide connects you to thousands of free High Definition video shows. Miro downloads video fast and stores it on your local computer for a level of quality that is often impossible on streaming video websites  (even the ones that call themselves 'HD').
   • Fullscreen, HD video on Miro is like nothing you've ever seen online.
3. Can't open a video? Now you can, with Miro. Miro can play virtually any type of video file - Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more.
   • When it comes to video podcasts, Miro goes far beyond iTunes by letting you subscribe to BitTorrent RSS feeds, with one of the fastest torrent downloaders in the world (it's called 'libtorrent').
4.  Instead of separate programs... for downloading torrent files and then watching them, Miro is one integrated experience. And Miro makes BitTorrent RSS dead simple-- when a new episode is available, it will download automatically and be ready to watch.
   • If you are trying to teach someone how to use BitTorrent, Miro is the easiest place to start. And Miro's torrent performance is powered by the screamingly fast open-source libtorrent engine, which is why we're also a favorite of hard-core torrenters.
5. Search, download, and save videos... from YouTube, Google Video, Blip, and more. You can even save a search term and automatically get new videos as they are posted. With YouTube's new HD support, the video quality can be incredible.
   

Enhancements:

• New features
• • Organize library by 'audio' 'video' and 'other'
  • Let people download from pages
  • Bigger search box on the search tab
  • Allow esc to stop playback when not in fullscreen (Thanks Uwe!)
  • Audio Playback behavior
  • Better handling for torrent directories that have multiple files in them
  • Better startup performance
  • Rewrote database layer from an object database to a relational database
• Bug fixes
• • Sort order lost when switching views
  • Fix random minor typos and inconsistencies (Thanks Uwe!)
  • Fix random typos (Thanks Uwe!)
  • Missing license headers in some files
  • User agent problems
  • New counter displays when it shouldn't
  • Performance - improve time from launch to play video
  • Performance: improve time from launch to use
  • [Patch-included] Pylint cleanup
  • Hitting enter key in the add channel dialog doesn't add the channel
  • Audio distortion on playback (Thanks Conrad!)
  • Autoupdate disabled on gtkx11
  • [Patch Included] Dragging multiple feeds to a folder is not possible (Thanks Jerry!)
  • [Patch Included] Cannot select multiple sites (Thanks Jerry!)
  • Can't compile against seamonkey xulrunner package (Thanks Larry!)
  • Thumnbail generation fails when using gstreamer with released versions of miro
  • Date format is not localized
  • Remove bsddb support
  • Segmentation fault with xine after playback
  • Unknown locales causes crash
  • Python 2.6 support
  • Miro doesn't place it's icons according to FreeDesktop? spec during installation
  • Xscreensaver support
    
  • (osx) make os x overlay fade after 2 seconds
  • (osx) Ogg Theora video doesn't play well within Os X
• Updates
  
  • (Wind) updated to VLC 1.0
• Other changes
• • Remove Yahoo! video from list of search engines