Version 1.0 of the open-source video player Miro was released earlier today. The non-profit company behind Miro has billed its new product not only as a Joost competitor but a purer one at that.
You can check out all of Miro’s perceived advantages here, but to sum them up: Miro is open-sourced, DRM-free, friendly to all content creators, connected to all the popular video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv, high definition, full of content, and BitTorrent-enabled. Joost, on the other hand, is proprietary, exclusive towards content creators, DRM-protected, closed to video sharing sites, lacking in content, lower quality, and entirely streaming video.
I’ve tried both Miro and Joost, and I like them both but for different reasons. Miro functions more like iTunes and is a good way to download batches of interesting videos from the internet regardless of whether they are professionally-produced or user-generated. Content must be downloaded via HTTP or BitTorrent, not streamed (although Miro can convert streams into downloads from sites like YouTube, blip.tv, and DailyMotion). You can download particular shows or just tell it to give you videos from particular categories (comedy, news, technology, etc.). Since videos must be downloaded, playback is not instant; but the videos load pretty quickly so it’s not a huge drawback.
Joost, at least on the surface, is better for viewing professionally-produced content instantly. Since Miro claims to match Joost’s number of commercial channels, however, this may be due simply to how Joost focuses exclusively on professionally-produced content. When you use Miro, you must wade through content not produced by major media outlets to find regular TV shows. And then when you find them, you’ll have to wait until many videos load via BitTorrent. Download speeds will then vary depending on how many people have the seeded the BitTorrent videos.
Miro will soon be available for co-branding so that content creators can create their own versions of the player with pre-configured channels filled with their own content.
Your first link to Miro seems wrong, I land on a German site (www.miro.com).
Should be http://www.getmiro.com I guess.
Hell Yeah to Zadi Diaz and Epic-Fu!
Thanks Michel, fixed.
Now projects like this show the true reality of the web startup business.
All those tens of millions of dollars beings thrown around by VC’s to startups is nothing more than friends and associates passing round money.
When you have a startup like miro develop something as good if not better than a $45 million dollars funded business like Joost its a joke.
Good luck to the Miro guys and girls.
A lesson to us all , you can bring down the big funded startup by developing something better from your garage or bedroom. Just waiting for a opensource startup to bring down google.
this is a really cool idea.
If this is tied to BitTorrent’s content, I’m not sure how successful it will be. The few times I’ve tried to download a video it’s always been a couple of hours wait…unacceptable for casual use.
I’m the Director of Business Development at Miro. I’m really excited to see us on TechCrunch.
Chandra: we’re not tied to BitTorrent. You can download any type of video from any type of source. We just support BitTorrent for people who want to use it. Most videos take just a minute or two to download, and in the not too distant future you’ll be able to start playing files immediately without waiting for them to download first.
Unless they’ve made vast improvements since I tried Miro, it should NOT be used for torrents. There’s no way to tweak any of its settings, and I had to delete Miro entirely in order to use my regular torrent program again.
Comparing miro and joost when it comes to funding, yep, joost have a lot of $$$ but comparing functionality and open source code, i will bet on miro.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
Miro is to media players what Firefox is to web browsers.
Chandra, BT seems to carry a lot of baggage, but I think we’ll see it more common as a transport, especially for larger files in the future with more legit content providers. I’ve used Miro with different protocols, and still for large files, BT works best. it’s not immediate or streaming, but you can schedule it to grab what you want, and in this model, BT works exclellent (sure beats waiting for Wednesday at 8:30, or whatever).
Seems that Joost has adopted too much of TV EPG interface which in my opinion is less aligned with what viewers equipped with a mouse and keyboard need.
I love Miro -pure functionality and Less noise and branded jazz
Problem with Joost is that if you’re outside of the US (Australia for me) none of the content works.
I’ve installed it and played around a few times, and all I can watch is content that I wouldn’t want to watch anyway.
At least with Miro, I can add my own content (rss feeds/torrents) or even just watch content I already have.
Funny that nobody (author and comments) seems to care that the point of Joost is to provide an experience close to watching TV.
The real competitor of Miro would then be iTunes and its TV shows that you have to download.
I’m a lazy couch potato: I want my TV now. I don’t want to configure a bit torrent thing… even downloading a show on iTunes takes too long compared to the real thing (TV with or without tivo). But iTunes gives me 15 mins of my life back (no breaks).
So, not sure who is Miro’s target… geeks and teens don’t need them to get free pirated content. And posh 30 something have better thing to do than downloading and configuring it.
Nobody is talking about Joost anymore anyway, they’re just going down and down: http://www.tren...en/trends/joost
Does it facilitate export to ipod?
Excellent – gonna get it right away!
Miro has become one of my top entertainment pieces of software
http://www.spid...-tv-and-videos/