Miro, formerly known as Democracy, calls itself the only video player you need and I think they are right, but it is more than that. It is a tool for subscribing and automatically downloading videos from across the Internet. You no longer have to go out to many different video web sites. You can pull them into a single location and easily organize them into categories. You can watch classic Popeye cartoons or video podcasts from PBS. They even have a section devoted to High Definition videos, as well as, a built in Bitorrent client. You may also download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video, among others. The software is free and open source. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. The interface is well designed. Miro is the iTunes for Internet video.
Miro is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit based in Worcester, MA. I am very impressed with the organization of the web site, the extensive documentation and technical support, although I did not run into any problems with the application. It just worked. Everything is clearly labeled in the application and is fairly intuiative. The online guide is helpful in finding channels and videos and subscribing is very easy. There is an excellent related web site called MakeInternetTV that is a guide that has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.
Here is a video demo of the Miro software running on Windows:
Don't take my word for it and check it out for yourself.
