Miro - 1.2.3

Fairly simple and it's nice to have a sort of ''old fashioned'' way to just browse through a bunch of available channels and subscribe to a bunch of stuff I might find interesting.

Suggestion: Take a look at what the folks at RSS Menu are doing. They have a very nice way to keep track of RSS feeds in the menubar and a feature like that for Miro would make this even better. This is what iTunes has been lacking since the get-go and if you want to attract a Mac crowd, this sort of quick access feature would greatly enhance the Miro experience.

So far so good and I'm going to let this thing run all the time to see how it fits into my daily life.

The biggest problem I have with Miro is how easy it is to get video into it compared to how hard it is to get video out of it. Even files downloaded as torrents are downloaded into Miro's library folder by default, and you have to go rooting through there to find them. There's no easy way to just grab them out and shove them somewhere else. To say nothing of downloaded Flash videos. Sure, you can download and save a YouTube video for offline watching. But only if you're content to keep it within Miro and have no desire or intention to sync it to your iPod or whatever. Again, you can go rooting through the Miro library and try and figure out what file it is, then have to convert it somehow (hint: TubeTV both downloads and converts, so can do the whole thing for you). Even iTunes lets you drag stuff out to the Finder, and that's the app that gets the most accusations of "lock-in". Dare I suggest that the "Democracy Player" isn't as democratic as it should be?

Miro is good in theory, but it feels like they stopped about 2/3 of the way there. I like the inclusion of BitTorrent and RSS support; they work well. And if you're content to have Miro be the center of your video world, then it might be the app for you. But I'm not. I want my stuff to go, to sync it to iPod, watch it on AppleTV, burn it to DVD, etc. With Miro, it's just too hard, so I tossed it out and went back to the manual stuff (Transmission, iTunes, QuickTime Player, VLC, etc).