Miro Public Preview review

Source: Mozilla Links / Percy Cabello

A public preview version of Miro, an open source video player and aggregator is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platform thanks in part to it being based on Mozilla technologies.

Formerly known as Democracy Player, Miro is partially funded through a Mozilla Foundation grant and developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation.

It also embeds VLC, a powerful open source multimedia player which gives it strong audio and video formats support including ASF, Windows Media Video, MP4, QuickTime, FLAC, AVI, MPEG-2, Theora, DivX, Xvid and Matroska among others. This support however is not extensive. For example, Matroska files distinguish for its ability to embed multiple audio and subtitle tracks in a single container. However there’s no way to change audio track or select a subtitle so far which is just sad. I was really hoping for it to be a silver bullet for the mess Internet delivered video is, but according to a forum discussion it may not be available until after 1.0 release.

Central to Miro is the Miro Guide, a video browsing interface to iTunes, that presents a collection of Channels created by video publishers. In Miro, Channels are nothing but video podcasts: web feeds with media specific tags that allow Miro to get the actual video files.

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