Miro : Watching YouTube Videos Made Offline and Simple

This post is been migrated to INITCRON.org

Are you tired of waiting till your favorite yououtube video stream is being buffered to avoid jitters?  Are you looking for an application to save youtube videos offline and watch them at your convenience
later? Do you want to save multiple parts of a video and watch it as a whole in one go? …. Try Miro.

Miro is an application which turns your computer into an internet TV video player. It has a concept of channels whereas viewers could browse through thousands of channels available and subscripbe to them and receive regular feeds downloaded at your desktop, some of the most popular being ‘National Geographic Video Shorts’, Discovery Channels Video Podcasts, Cartoons, Spanish Learning Channel etc.

Here are few interesting features available with Miro:

1. Watch YouTube Videos: One can search, download and watch YouTube videos and videos from maany more video streaming sites such as Google Videos, Yahoo Videos, Blogdigger, Blip.tv, DailyMotion. The application actually downloads the videos to harddisk, making it available to be watched offline. By default the video expires in 5 days, which can be changed with option to store it permanently on the drive.

2. Video Player: Miro also acts as a video player for the internet videos. It uses embedded player such as gstreamer, xine in linux and vlc on windows, and quicktime on Mac to play the videos. One could
actually watch videos in fullscreen mode, which apparently looks better than that watching it on youtube. And users could play videos, which generally come in the parts, as if it is a single video.

3. Cross Platform: Miro is a Open Source Software, released under GPL License, and is avaialble on Linux, Windows, and Mac Operating Systems.

4. Widely Supported Formats: Miro supports a wide range of video formats including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H,264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video(Youtube Videos) and many more.

5. Channels and Automatic Video Downloads: Miro comes with an in built channel guide, which users can brows through and select thier favourite channels. Once added, users can configure miro to download videos automatically as and when added.

6. Podcasts Compatible: You could add your podcasts that you have been downloading automatically with itunes so far, to Miro as a channel. Once added, all new podcasts can be downloaded automatically.

7. Share: Users could search videos, watch them and share with friends using social sites such as del.icio, digg, reddit etc.

Even though its released as a beta, overall, Miro is a wonderful app to have on your desktop.

Linux on slow computer Episode 1

This post is been migrated to INITCRON.org

Well, I’m back at home now and I’m on holidays so I’m too free and decided to look out for old computers to try out linux and I found a Pentium III 800 MHZ 256MB Ram with 10GB hard disk (IDE).

I tried out Vector Linux (STD) on it. For those who don’t have a clue about vector linux, you can visit http://www.vectorlinux.com, it is based on Slackware, installation is in text mode and it is not that easy for a beginner (let me remind you to read the manual 1st before you try installing), XFCE interface, uses XMMS to play music, MPlayer and Xine to play videos and I must say they changed the skins and made it as default which is pretty impressive as they definately look better than downloading it yoursef with very ugly skin as default for MPlayer. I’ve never liked MPlayer because of the looks. I don’t need a very good looking player but at least lookable.

As for internet browsers, it comes with Firefox, Opera and Seamonkey. Well I sticked with Opera as it was the fastest loadin, Pidgin to connect to MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, GoogleTalk and so on. They did a good job in creating VASM (Vector Linux’s Administration and System Menu) – a graphical tool which helps configure systems and network adminitrations. K3B, Xfburn is the burning tools, ripperX and X264 is the audio and video ripper. It comes with Adobe Reader 8, Abiword(replacement for MS Word), Gnumeric Spreadsheet, Scribus and a calculator.

It comes with one of my favourite games as well, Mega Mario. It was quite good. It was running fast, graphical boot (I didn’t get that with Ubuntu), it had the basic need mostly I would say. You could even make the panels and windows transparent(like Vista effect) and it didn’t become slow. I rather install this than have any Windows installed in it. Thanks to people that created it. There are few versions on Vector Linux, but I used the standard edition as it was the fastest available for my computer because I like speed. I could have installed the KDE version but I’m not a fan of KDE so i decided to install the XFCE instead. Thank you. Next I’ll try Xubuntu. Till then.

Vector Linux Std 5.9