I have long believed that we are moving toward the idea of home servers to hold our DVD, music, and picture albums and that such equipment will be fully integrated into our family room TV sets and accessible at the touch of a button. My other notion is that cable TV will be reduced to just local news and all other content will be on-demand access through company websites either through streaming video or downloads.
The problem with my utopia, is searchability. As most of you have experienced, Google does not do video search that well and though many are trying to offer a solution, going to a website and typing in your desired video and then sifting through endless hits is not the idea I have in mind when sitting on my couch with a remote in my hand.
Enter Miro. Miro is an all inclusive HD player (that's right, it handles High Def video). It can take control of all your video files and render Windows Media Player (even VLC or GOM, neither one does HD very well) worthless. The first thing it does on install is index all your videos and provide an easy management system for all your illegally obtained South Park video.
It also has RSS video subscription that it handles in the form of channels. For those of you that dont understand this... it means that you subscribe to say the ESPN channel and as new video is posted (I noticed that Around the Horn is there, even though nobody watches it) the channel will let you know that there is content. This is as close as anyone has come to online TV that I know and Miro boasts over 2000 of these channels.
So maybe you dont want to just watch TV shows... Miro also handles your Bittorrent files. You will still have to go to your favorite bit torrent site but once you click on your download, Miro takes over.
Miro does all this and it looks sleek as hell while it does it... but thats not the best part. It is completely open source. That means that user add-ons will shortly be on their way (bittorrent searching for example). For those of you who have made the jump to Firefox, you know what open source means. It means functionability. Tabs? Weather? Music controls inside your browser? I got news for you, they were in Firefox long before Internet Explorer even thought about it. Fact is, the general populous will play with Miro and decide what it lacks and 14 year old geeks will script that little something that will make this player all the more kickass.
Long story short (too late, I guess) Miro 1.0 is going to do for online video watching what Netscape did for internet browsing, which means it will become the rally cry for millions of attention-deficit adults who want to watch Sportscenter and The Extras on their schedule, not on the Networks. Mark my words... Link to the download
2 comments:
great post... when you emailed me the story, my first instinct was to ask you to post it. Good job of telling us why this is so cool.
I assume it does music cause i dont watch that faggy utube crap.
I just read the bad news about Galactica. They have only finished 10 of the last 22 episodes. More than likely they will not start again until the strike is over.
apparently all the nerds at a convention are going to march one of these days too.
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