Sunday, November 04, 2007

Miro

I hate the iTunes podcasting subscription capabilities. It never plays them sequentially, so I have to start them up one at a time. It takes forever to download a podcast - minutes for something I know is just 20 megs or so. And I can't get it to group, autopull correctly (i.e. if I miss a day, it doesn't autograb), or do some of the other things I'd like it to do, like queue up YouTube.

So I tried Miro. It's not flawless, but the speed alone makes it a hands down winner over iTunes. I can download dozens of videos in the time it takes to grab two off iTunes. No DRM. No glitching/hanging. Queuing. As a matter of fact, I can create folders (politics, humor, tech, etc.) and add feeds, and then watch them sequentially if I like as a mixed set. While riding my bike for sixty minutes, I watched a mix of The Onion (the bit on how to help paranoid schizophrenics by spying on them with technology was standout), movie trailers, Media Matters, and Crooks and Liars. It was like my own little news channel. You can also capture YouTube videos to your desktop, and queue them up in playlists if you want to watch low-grade music videos in some sort of order, like a great big list of Jesus videos. You can create search channels as well - so if you need to search YouTube for all nipple videos as they're added, you can.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Scooter,

Thanks so much for writing about Miro — strong independent media coverage has been a huge factor in Miro's success.

Feel free to get in touch any time to share further ideas or impressions: [my first name]@pculture.org

Best,
Dean Jansen
Outreach Director
PCF/Miro

Scooter said...

Wow...that was a quick notice and visit, Dean. Thanks for the comment. You have a nice product so far.