When I wrote my book Leo Laporte’s Guide to TiVo (which was really Gareth Branwyn’s Guide to TiVo — I wrote the book, he got his picture and name on the cover), I titled one of the chapters “DIY Network Programming.” I realized that, with TiVo’s ability (especially a hacked Series 1 TiVo) to search through the TV guide data and record only the shows you wanted, you were basically constructing your own TV channel out of all the content available, using Google-lite searches. Miro is that same technology, but applied to all of the video content of the Internet and it’s cross-platform, free and open source.

Miro, which was first named Democracy, was created by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It works on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. The really amazing thing about it is that it can scoop up pretty much any video content across the Web, from YouTube, Google Video, and mainstream TV content online, to BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing) to any video content that’s attached to an RSS feed, anywhere in cyberspace. I love the way it so seamlessly integrates mainstream commercial content, P2P content, and amateur content so that they all carry the same weight. Democratizing, indeed. The mission of the Participatory Culture Foundation is to bring the power to create, distribute, and view Internet TV to anyone who wants it. It’s TiVo meets Public Access TV meets Google… or something like that. It’s your next download.

Here to download Miro.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Media, Science and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.