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November 13, 2007 4:48 PM PST

Miro leaves beta, stability issues behind

by Seth Rosenblatt

The Participatory Culture Foundation's universal video player has finally left the development world with its first non-beta release, Miro 1.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are very few changes to distinguish this version from the previous beta versions that have come out in the past two months. Beside the fact that you can now delete a video while it's playing with impunity, all the changes are minor bug fixes to sort out stability concerns and other small tweaks.

The biggest crash issue that was fixed on the Windows version was a bug where video thumbnail regeneration was causing the app to die. Another problem, where the Avast antivirus program was incorrectly flagging the Miro beta as spyware, seems to have been resolved, too.

Poised to become the ultimate desktop video app, Miro handles every major video format we tried, including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, 3GP, and others. It downloads torrents and has a wealth of settings geared for user customization: You can e-mail videos, auto-delete, auto-download, set favorites, organize your video collection, and more. Also, by arranging content feeds into "channels," Miro has shown that there's no need to reinvent television terminology when it's useful.

With most of the stability issues resolved, Miro has jumped from a good idea with unfortunate usage problems to one of the strongest desktop user experiences combining the influx of Web-based video content with an open-source sensibility.

Miro is a repository of free video programming, similar to Joost. It also might tell this fur seal where its bucket lies.

(Credit: Participatory Culture Foundation)
Originally posted at Webware
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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (6 Comments)
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by bernie.mcginn November 14, 2007 5:07 PM PST
miro is pretty cool!
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by bernie.mcginn November 14, 2007 5:08 PM PST
SO COOL THAT I WILL SAY IT AGAIN : Cool!
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by eng.dan November 14, 2007 5:53 PM PST
super cool
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by rafe November 14, 2007 6:14 PM PST
testing reply
by rafe November 14, 2007 6:13 PM PST
Agreed
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by gmtheace November 15, 2007 10:17 AM PST
kewl
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