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Inside Online Video

Miro: Open-Source Video Browser

by Mike Abundo on November 4th, 2007


The video browser wars are heating up: the closed Joost, the branded VeohTV, and now the open-source Miro. Formerly known as Democracy, Miro sports features that will probably become standard for online video junkies: video metasearch, streaming video downloads, a video torrent client, a video podcatcher, video metadata, and video cleanup. Even VeohTV doesn’t implement those last two features very well. The only big things missing from Miro are widget support (available in both Joost and VeohTV) and browser plugins to detect video streams and feeds (available in VeohTV).

The open-source audio podcatcher Juice has seen over 2,500,000 downloads, even seducing me away from the branded PodNova client. Will the open source video podcatcher Miro see similar success, seducing me away from the branded VeohTV? That depends on Miro building out its features. I suggest they start with those browser plugins, because mouse potatoes (1) don’t want to copy-paste feed URLs, and (2) don’t want to search for a video they’re already watching on YouTube.

One thing’s for sure: with more and more ways to automatically pull and surf HD video from across Web, I sure as Hell won’t be settling for Joost’s TV fare.

POSTED IN: Miro

1 opinion for Miro: Open-Source Video Browser

  • xnova
    Dec 6, 2007 at 6:24 am

    What I don’t like about Miro is you have to download videos in order to watch them, unlike VeohTV. If they made it so that you could watch streaming videos without downloading them, they might be competition to VeohTV.

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