[ close ]
Help Upgrade the Web: Download Firefox 3.5

why you should heart miro

March 28, 2008 in Freedom, GNOME, Linux, Miro, Mozilla, Open Web, Video | 12 comments

You should care about Miro. For me, it’s become the mainstay of my video playing experience, be it to play TED talks (there’s a whole set of channels for that) Wired Science (yep, a channel for that too) or Timo’s HD Movie Trailers, The Onion News Network or Google Tech Talks they have a lot of great free and fun content. And they make it easy to get.

But even more important to me personally, there are two specific things that make them great. First, they are a non-profit foundation much in the same was as the Mozilla Foundation is. They believe strongly that video on the Internet should be made easily available without false scarcity, and everyone should be able to publish and distribute video.

And second – and even more important in many ways – is the mechanism that they choose to use to do it. They are doing it through direct action. They aren’t lobbying congress or staging protests or talking to the press. Instead they choose to be the change they want to see in the world and build real things that normal people can use. By building a base of users, by encouraging legitimate use of bittorrent to lower the costs of distribution, by helping to organize content and allow normal people to publish, they are changing the way that video on the Internet will work. And they are doing it in a competitive marketplace.

The technology is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform and is available on OSX, Windows and Linux

I just donated $100 to Miro to help get them bridge the gap to sustainability. You don’t have to donate that much, of course. They will take donations as low as $10. But you should do your part and help them out. Especially if you heart Miro like I do.

  1. tretle’s avatar

    tretle on March 28, 2008 at 1:40 pm

    The idea was a nice one but in essence its just a mash up of a bit torrent client with a video player. It doesn’t manage your current videos very well, its not customizable. The Windows and OSX builds get more attention then the Linux ones. They don’t listen to community suggestions and it doesn’t work with gstreamer. No gstreamer I say :( lol

  2. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on March 28, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    gstreamer is in the works.

  3. troll’s avatar

    troll on March 28, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    I have wanted to love Miro for a long time already. It just makes it nearly impossible. It is hilarious how the client can be so heavy that it manages to bog down the newest quad core systems and feels sluggish all the way.

    The python should go? No idea what the real root reason is, but something should be seriously done about that.

    On top of that… Now as Banshee gained video support too, I’d re-implement Miro as Banshee plugin. Higher integration level would be a killer feature. All that is required is to add rss / torrent support and some sort of browser that uses eg. web service api to access the directory or something like that… And you don’t have to have different applications for Miro’ed content and the rest.

  4. Dean’s avatar

    Dean on March 28, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Chris,

    I noticed your name in the list of donors today — was going to write you a nice e.mail, but instead I’ll say it here. THANKS! The combination of a very generous donation and a blog post encouraging others to join in is FAR more than we could ever ask for. You rock.

    Tretle,

    Just noticed your comment as I was writing this. You’re right about the management of videos — we’ve got some big interface improvements in the pipeline. That said, our resources are very thin. We do our best to focus on all 3 platforms, and have always hoped that we could build more of a community on the Linux side.

    As for community suggestions being ignored, I don’t think that’s true — again, it’s a matter of having enough resources to address suggestions that come in. I personally put a lot of energy into listening to users, responding to questions, and relaying concerns to developers. We’re not perfect, but we’re working hard.

    Finally, if I remember correctly, we’re working on moving both Windows and Linux to use gstreamer by default. You may already be able to switch to gstreamer: http://www.getmiro.com/documentation/index.php/Change_Video_Playback_from_xine_to_gstreamer

    –Dean (outreach for PFC/Miro)

  5. Livio’s avatar

    Livio on March 28, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    Miro needs love, but it’s not worth loving, currently.

    * XULRunner-build works only on Windows with 1.2 release.
    * they used GtkMozEmbed instead of GtkTreeView for the sidebar.
    * Miro is exteremely slow piece of software
    * doesn’t have tangoish icon (; .

  6. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on March 28, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Livio -

    You should talk to the developers. I’m not sure how they feel about it, but I know at Mozilla we’ve been happy to take Tango icons and our Linux builds look really good as a result. The best I can suggest is that if there’s something you want to dive in and fix then do it! They are always looking for motivated people @ Miro to hack on stuff.

  7. Kurt (supernova_00)’s avatar

    Kurt (supernova_00) on March 28, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    Maybe I’m blind but where the heck do we download it at? I do not see a download link anywhere on the site.

  8. Mikael Håkansson’s avatar

    Mikael Håkansson on March 28, 2008 at 4:45 pm

    You can download it at http://www.getmiro.com/

  9. Livio’s avatar

    Livio on March 29, 2008 at 4:07 am

    > You should talk to the developers.

    I’ve already filed bugs.

    > I’m not sure how they feel about it, but I know at Mozilla we’ve been happy to take Tango icons and our Linux builds look really good as a result.

    I saw WONTFIX in bugzilla…

    > The best I can suggest is that if there’s something you want to dive in and fix then do it!

    I have to learn Python…

    > They are always looking for motivated people @ Miro to hack on stuff.

    I appreciate, that you’re motivating me, but currently I can only haunt for bus ;) .

  10. Nicolas Mailhot’s avatar

    Nicolas Mailhot on March 29, 2008 at 5:29 am

    Miro is nice. I wish it well.

    However I find it strange for MoFo people to get wild about “free content” and “video” when Firefox font bugs are usually answered with “works with Microsoft fonts, will look at it later”.

    Most people will care about text content first, but having text content depend on proprietary fonts (either because the FLOSS fonts are not there, or because the browser people don’t feel fixing problems exposed by non-MS fonts is high priority) is acceptable?

  11. will’s avatar

    will on March 30, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    Chris–a thousand thank yous! Long comment follows–sorry about that.

    I wanted to clear some bits up.

    1. Tretle–I’d be interested in knowing what we’re not listening to. I’m pretty sure we respond to all bugs within a couple of days of them getting filed. I know Janet and I watch Bugzilla like hawks. Toss me an email and we can discuss it: will.guaraldi at pculture.org . That’s true for anyone else feeling ignored here, too.

    2. Miro has had gstreamer support in gtkx11 for a long time. In versions prior to 1.2, Miro defaults to xine and you had to fiddle with things to get gstreamer working. Miro 1.2 added a preference to make it trivial to switch between the two renderers. The next version of Miro (1.3 or 1.5–whatever is next) will use gstreamer by default on gtkx11. That change is already in trunk.

    3. Livio–We appreciate the fact that you’re filing bug reports and I’ve done my best to work with them. It’s been difficult to understand what you’re getting at, but I’m definitely not ignoring you. Please continue filing bug reports and helping us/me understand what it is you’re getting at.

    I don’t think anyone is saying that Miro is perfect, but we’re moving along, we’re learning how users are using Miro, we’re making changes and it’s getting better with every release. In that way, we’re like any other Free Software/Open Source project. Because it’s Free Software/Open Source, you and everyone else in the world can participate in its growth.

    I think there will be more convergence in the Internet video player domain as content producers and publishers are getting smarter about Internet distribution. That’s a good thing. That means our mission of building the distribution model on top of existing open standards is working. That helps everyone–it’s not our mission to be a monopoly in the Internet video player domain.

    If any of you are in the Cambridge, MA area, toss me an email–I’d love to grab a cup of coffee and maybe do some Miro hacking.