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.