Miro

The new Miro is almost ready— we’ve just posted a Release Candidate for Miro 2.0. That means it’s close to what we think will be the final version but we want some help making sure we haven’t missed any serious bugs.

Download Miro 2.0 RC1 — Download for Windows — Download for Mac — Download Source

There’s lots of new features and a brand new interface— try it out and let us know if you see anything wrong.

As Dean mentioned last week, we need more volunteers to help with translating and testing. Here’s how you can get involved:

Translating Miro: As many of you know, Miro and the Miro Guide are 100% volunteer translated. If you know any non-English languages, then we’d love to have you translate and/or refine the existing translations. Instructions for helping translate >>

Testing Miro: Using the latest pre-release version of Miro is really fun — and if you’ve got some time to help us run a few tests, we’d be really happy. Testing Steps:

1. Download the pre-release version of Miro 2.0 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
2. (optional) Back up your Miro database… better safe than sorry.
3. Install your pre-release.
4. Help us run Litmus tests. Janet has an easy to follow guide for testing with Litmus.

Thanks!

Note: there is an issue with YouTube downloads on every version of Miro. It should be fixed for RC2.

Last week, I talked about the most popular channels on YouTube, but that’s only part of the story. As I said then, an unfortunate consequence of YouTube’s overwhelming market dominance is that content producers can feel compelled to publish there first, and sometimes use it as their only means of distribution. It’s fortunate, then, that YouTube has RSS feeds built in for each of their channels AND that Miro can download YouTube vids direct to disk, because there is some really great content up there.

This week, we’ve picked our favorite channels that use YouTube as their only distribution channel, and added them to the Miro Guide. These range from hilarious original series, like Drunk History or You Suck at Photoshop, to extremely talented, if not quite “mainstream” musicians like Ronald Jenkees, to simply bizarre and fascinating spectacles like the musical animatronic performances of the Rock-afire Explosion (with props to Christopher W for suggesting that one!) If these kinds of things sound interesting to you, there’s plenty more where that came from.

So, if you want to see some really great stuff that until now has been largely confined to streaming on YouTube, you can subscribe to all our favorites here:

If we missed any of your favorite YouTube channels, let us know in the comments!