Monday 29 June 2009

Miro 2.0 - Watch TV Podcasts and Videos in HD

Miro is an open-source and cost-free application for watching Internet TV in high definition quality. It's available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

The latest release is 2.0.5 and it was released on June 25, and some of the features it comes with are:
- watch Internet videos in HD, subscribe to many, completely free podcasts
- resume playing to where you stopped a video last time
- support for many video formats (including MKV, AVI, Quicktime)
- it allows the creation of video playlists
- support for the BitTorrent protocol
- support for audio podcasts
- Miro can search and download videos from sites like YouTube or Yahoo!

Usual interface when Miro starts

Beside being an Internet TV application, Miro can also play various video files, including AVI, WMV or MPEG. It also supports Matroska MKV video files, but it won't play SWF ones.

Miro playing an MKV video file

Miro comes by default with several HD podcasts, for example Wild Life or INSERT, so you can start downloading and viewing them immediately. One of the drawbacks is that Miro doesn't seem able to play Shockwave Flash videos (SWF), so you will have to use a player like mplayer for those.

Watching a Wildlife video podcast in HD

Miro also allows to download torrents and also to subscribe to torrent feeds, then access them from within Miro. The default website included is LegalTorrents, which provides completely legal and free audio and video torrents.

Download torrents from within Miro and watch them

I think Miro is just great for watching TV podcasts. You can download entire videos and even make personal collections depending on your preferences. Another plus is the support for BitTorrent protocol.

Official Miro homepage

1 comment:

Onizuka89 said...

Miro is great! If I was really interested in Podcasts I would use it way more often than I do, but currently it is only the LinuxJournal with Shawn Powers which I found interesting, except for a few audio ones, which is better of on a music player since they start up faster.

Look forward to the future releases of it :D