Miro can automatically download videos from RSS-based "channels", manage them and play them. The application is designed to mesh with other Participatory Culture Foundation products such as Video Bomb, a social tagging video website, and the Channel Channel, a TV guide for Internet television. Miro integrates an RSSnews aggregator and podcatcher, a BitTorrent client, and a media player. Since 2.0, Miro supports the adding of website bookmarks under the "Sites" category; by default, ClearBits.net is preloaded in Miro as a bookmark. Examples of supported video files are QuickTime, Windows Media Video, MPEG, Audio Video Interleave, XVID as a video player. It also supports RSS BitTorrent. When a new video is available, the program will notify and download if possible. The Miro Video Converter converts video formats. It is based on FFmpeg with profiles for the Theora,.mp4, and WebM video formats supported by various devices. A developer of Miro wrote that the Windows installer installs proprietary commercial software such as browser add-ons, also known as crapware, stating "This is one of the primary ways we fund continued Miro development."
History
The application was first launched in 2005 as Democracy Player and later on as Miro in 2007. Video searching of web-based video archives was included in 2007, with access to various archives changing over time. Miro is mostly written in Python, although it links to various libraries written in a variety of languages. Versions through 2.x had an almost entirely HTML/CSS based UI. Miro uses embedded WebKit in a GTK window on Unix/Linux, WebKit in a Cocoa window on macOS, and Mozilla in a XUL window on Windows. Since version 3.0, the macOS port uses Cocoa and others use GTK. The embedded web browser is used only for web pages.
Reception
Miro received a favorable review from Josh Quittner who wrote "I have seen the future of television and it’s an application called Miro." In May 2011, Seth Rosenblatt of CNET wrote, "Providing one-stop shopping for all your video and audio management desires, open-source and cross-platform Miro deserves much of the praise that's been heaped upon it." The Softonic review gave the software a score of 9/10, and described the software as "a perfect example of how video content from different sources can be integrated into one single application and served directly to your PC in a fast, easy and elegant way."
