The Democracy Video Player, a free player for online videos, has been re-branded and re-launched as “Miro” by its developers, the not-for-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

The new Miro player is more polished and more stable than ever, according to Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of PCF. The restructured channel guide makes finding videos easy, and the addition of Veoh.com as one of the inbuilt video search engines opens up even more available content.

Miro currently has 1571 channels, many of which are in high definition. Similar to RSS news aggregators, the software can subscribe to channels and automatically download new content for you. Videos from YouTube can also be downloaded and saved.

The Future of Online Media

The new name and logo (which was designed by Jon Hicks, who designed the Firefox logo) represents the next evolution of PCF’s vision: To reach more people through open source video standards.

The company believes there’s an imminent danger that threatens the future of online media – the danger being development of proprietary systems and the monopolization of video content. It’s striving to prevent this scenario through promotion of open standards.

I found the software slick to look at and easy to use – within minutes of downloading and installing it, I was watching HD video about transforming waste in to clean energy (my good deed for the day!).

[GetMiro.com Blog]

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