Miro

We’re getting a bunch of new store items ready for the Miro launch– so far, we have some awesome new t-shirt designs and some logo stickers. For Democracy Player, we’ve been doing the shipping ourselves, but it really would make a lot more sense for us to do it through someone that’s actually good at it.

Basically we need a company that can receive merch from our suppliers, take the orders, ship them, do customer support, etc. We generally prefer working with small and independent companies, but we’ll consider anyone. Also, we’re coding our own shopping cart since we couldn’t find one that was simple and easy enough for our tastes (it will be open-source when it’s ready). The cart will work through paypal, so the shipping company will either need to be able to get the orders from our paypal account or have us point the paypal IPN thing at their database. We’re happy to integrate with anyone’s backend, but we want to be able to do our nice clean front-end.

Any suggestions? You can leave comments or email me: nicholas (at) pculture.org

Thanks!

Most of the gnu/linux versions of 0.9.6 have been posted at the downloads page: Go get em. This includes support for Ubuntu Feisty.

Update: there were some issues, but it should be fixed now.

We have just released version 0.9.6 of Democracy Player. It is a *big* update, with lots of new features, bug fixes, and improvements. It’s also the last version ever of Democracy Player. The next release from us will be under our new name, Miro.

And here it is: Download Democracy Player 0.9.6

Below are all the new features in this release, but I’d like to talk a little about the most exciting new feature, “folder watching”. It’s a new preference panel that let’s you pick folders on your local computer to include in your video collection. When a new video shows up in that folder, it will appear in your collection. Do you download videos from your browser to your desktop? Set Democracy Player to watch your desktop for new videos. Do you keep all your videos on an external hard drive? Add that hard drive to your collection and get all your videos organized in Democracy Player. Try it out.

The new features:

1. Folder watching (what I just wrote about above).

2. Resume playback. If you’re watching a 15 minute video and stop halfway, we’ll remember where you were when next time you watch it. There’s a preference setting to turn this on and off.

3. Auto-updating for Mac users. This should be the last time that Mac users will need to go to their browser to download a new version. From now on, when a new version is released you’ll be able to install it within the app and relaunch (we’re now using Sparkle). Windows users don’t have auto-update yet, but we’ll be able to give you details about what’s new in each release from within the app (right now it just tells you that there’s a new version, with no details).

4. Minimize to tray on windows– when you click the red x in the upper right, the application will hang out in the system tray. A much requested feature.

5. Windows Vista compatibility. This solves playback issues for some Vista users.

6. Resizing of thumbnails. We now resize and cache thumbnails so that the images displayed are smoother. This also makes switching between channels much faster.

7. More thorough proxy support.

8. Ability to play audio files on mac (previously we sent you out to an external player).

9. Many more keyboard shortcuts on Windows. This will make remote control support easy. Full keyboard shortcuts for Mac are coming soon with the first version of Miro.

10. Bug fixes, memory use reduction, memory leak fixes. Updated Perian on OSX to version 1.0b5.

We hope you enjoy all the improvements, please let me know what you think.

From here until Miro 1.0 we are focused almost exclusively on fixing bugs. If you find a bug, you can file it here.