Miro struggles for relevance
A major update to Miro promises, among other things, big improvements to speed, so I though I’d give this feed reader and viewer for videos another try.
As an open source project, Miro has been in development for a few years now, starting off with the unfortunate name Democracy Player. It has since matured quite nicely to the point where it has an attractive and easy-to-use interface along with — as promised —plenty of snap.
I subscribed to the feed for The Onion, and in no time had a list of a dozen or so episodes to choose from. They loaded quickly and I was able to waste many happy minutes watching them.
Encouraged by this, I decided to explore some of Miro’s other offerings. The Miro guide presents a tabbed screen of new shows, popular shows, HD shows and genres. Miro betrays its open source roots with the popular shows section being topped by such gems as GimpKnowHow, Ubunter and Linux Journal — you can’t get much more niche than that.
Mousing over icons for individual shows produces popups with details about them. In my testing, this feature was a bit buggy. Sometimes a popup for the wrong show would come up, and there didn’t seem to be an easy way to dismiss it.
Despite this niggle, I found there were plenty of shows to explore by going through the various genres. I came to the realization, though, that many of these programs are, well, podcasts. So I checked out the iTunes Store and sure enough there were the same Onion videos that could be watched within iTunes or subscribed to for later viewing.
But Miro aspires to be more. For example, you can use it to search for and download legal torrents. The emphasis, though, is on legal — you won’t find any Hollywood movies the way you would with Vuze, which downloads and displays videos of all types. (Vuze also allows for subscriptions, by the way, but doesn’t offer anything in the way of a program guide like the one in Miro.)
Should this be considered a limitation? That’s up to your conscience and the laws of the land in which you live.
In short, Miro is a good app — good at what it does. But it still seems in search of a purpose that extends into the mainstream.
Posted Friday, March 26, 2010 in Reviews
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