What if you could get a HD video player, browser and a video version of google reader all rolled into one? Is there such a tool? Yes, there is, and it’s called the Miro HD video player. Best of all, Miro is open source software, so it’s free. It’s a smart idea. It’s a video player with a built-in content guide to over 6000 internet and podcast videos. You can either search for a video or subscribe to an RSS video feed, so you get the latest episodes as soon as they are posted.
And if you don’t like anything in the content guide, Miro will grab the HD videos from youtube, google, blip and other video sharing sites. Just as google reader subscribes to blogs, the Miro player subscribes to video feeds. So it automatically shows you the latest episodes from your favourite feed in the player sidebar. As soon as it’s available, you can watch it. This ‘pull’ technology is great feature of RSS readers; it’s a real time-saver for me. And now you can do the same with videos and video feeds.
Miro has been developed to play high definition and will always try to grab the HD version of any video. It downloads videos fast and in any format. You can watch the videos online, or you can save them to your PC and watch them offline as well. It’s easy and free to download. There is a user guide and even a video making 101 tutorial for budding video publishers.
I found downloading and installing Miro on my laptop quick and easy. Watching a few example videos the picture quality was really very good, even in full screen mode, and I loved the feed bar on the left for organising your videos, podcasts and video feeds. Miro is intensive on my scarce laptop resources. It used up a lot of disk space and downloading was slow, but this is probably due to the heavily oversubscribed broadband network where I live.
If you want quality, it’s just a better way to watch videos.
