Download Monkey

Who's it from?

Miro is a product of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF).

Where can I find it?

www.getmiro.com

What does it offer?

The Miro guide (which is used to browse available content within the player) currently lists 4000 channels available for subscription. Unfortunately these are not the channels we all know and love. You will not find the latest episode of Lost or Futurama here. Looking around the guide I decided to try downloading a National Geographic short video and high definition video of the latest Diggnation podcast. Miro also taps into a range of online video sites for content: YouTube, Blip.tv, Yahoo Video to name just a few.

So?

Miro is not your usual video on demand solution. The project is not for profit, it is not tied into any networks or content providers and the player is free of any advertising. Downloading Miro from the web took about 5 minutes and once installed the application fired up without the need to create an account or provide anyone with my credit card details (after all its free). Its a real pleasure to not be badgered for my details for once!

What I really like about Miro is the software itself. The interface is very familiar to anyone who has used iTunes and browsing and downloading content is very straightforward. The software plays pretty much anything you throw at it which helps remove a technical barrier that plagued online video in the early days.

The player offers all the features you would expect: full screen, RSS, video library, playlists and has a few hidden extra gems such as BitTorrent and auto-download of new content as soon as it becomes available. Lets talk about the available content... its lacking to say the least. Sure there are plenty of great podcasts around and we can use Miro to watch them, but we can also use iTunes (something I already have) to do exactly the same thing... and iTunes syncs with my iPod! Having spent quite a bit of time looking through the guide I can safely say this is where Miro fails, after all what use is a nice video player if we have nothing to watch on it.

Speed and Quality

Miro does not support streaming video. Even the video content taken from YouTube has to be completely downloaded before it is watched. For me this is a real set back. I really love streaming video because the reward is instant. It also means you can decide if you want to watch the rest of a particular video very quickly. After downloading the National Geographic podcast (luckily it only took a minute or two) I soon realised that the video as not for me. I had wasted time downloading a video that I now have to delete. In short: wasted time and wasted bandwidth. In comparison the Diggnation podcast took an hour to download (it's the HD version), luckily for me I like the Diggnation podcast so its an hour that I haven't wasted.

The speed of the downloads varies greatly as the videos are being sourced from many different servers, all over the web. It really depends on what you are after, and where it is coming from. This applies to the quality also. Some podcasts are encoded with quality in mind while others are designed for handheld devices. The Miro guide does have a section dedicated to HD so you can source the best quality video but unfortunately most of them are geeky tech podcasts.

Download Monkey's conclusion...

I like what Miro are trying to achieve with the player, the idea of free video via the web is very appealing.The problem I have is that without anything decent to watch the player really suffers. Add a programme like Family Guy to the channels list and instantly the software gets appeal but I don't see this happening anytime soon. If Miro could incorporate decent content from the big providers (even if we had to pay for it) I would jump on board... why? because Miro makes online video easy.

Review by elev3n

April 2008