On Tuesday, Miro v1.0 was released by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation. Formerly known as “The Democracy Player”, this little player improved both its name and the stability problems it was plagued with. After seeing this announcement, I immediately (well after a little thought of “do I really need another media player” followed by “yes”) went to download it.

After playing with it the past few days, I must say I like it. It’s a combination media player, bit torrent client and podcatcher, but this is all very much behind the scenes. With iTunes, I’m still very aware of the RSS behind the scenes and often have to paste in URLs. In Miro, I haven’t seen any address yet. It very much has a need-to-know attitude and hides things (like RSS URLs) that the user doesn’t need to know about. Anyway, let’s get on to the review…

After the install, Miro starts up with a little tutorial. In Step 1, you’re presented with a video that gives you a little overview of Miro:

In Step 2, you can easily add different groupings of channels. You’re not made aware of how these channels are synch’d or what’s behind the scenes, simply click the add button and it’s yours:

And then a little statement that tells you that it’s downloading and that you can start playing around:

So after the install and setup, you’ll have all your channels synchronizing and downloading content. You can easily see all your channels in the panel to the left and also the number of videos downloaded for each channel. There’s also a selection to view all your new (unwatched) videos as well as all the videos currently downloading. In the right panel is a view of the currently selected channel and all the the videos in it. The information and action buttons are very clear and very pleasing to the eyes. You can view the nitty gritty details of each item or just play happily with the overview of each:

As you can see they take their UI pretty seriously, which can be rare in free applications like this. But this isn’t just another pretty application. These guys obviously put great effort towards usability as well. For instance, after I installed it I was messing around with the options to see what was there. I found a field to change the downloaded video folder, so I changed it to reside on my data drive instead of the default. However, by that point videos were already downloading. So I made peace with the fact that I’d probably have to delete all the downloaded videos and redownload them to the new location, but after pressing OK I received this:

So now I don’t have to worry about any of that. Coolness. So what’s left to say about Miro? It’s clean. It’s slick. It’s polished. It doesn’t bog you down with details you don’t need to know or options you don’t care about. It’s simple to navigate and easy to add new channels.

My only problem is that now with Miro, Beyond TV, and the other video podcasts out there, I’m never short of video. If it were only legal to watch video while driving…