Miro 2.0... the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

First lets start with the good news. The gui is much more responsive. Interacting with the sidebar is a smoother experience. With previous releases it was possible to lock up the entire application for seconds at a time when selecting a new channel or trying to play a video. All of that has been fixed. Switching channels and videos is now seamless and instantaneous. Not only has the underlying code obviously been reworked but the look and feel has been overhauled too. It fits in with my GNOME desktop better than before now that Miro seems to use more GTK elements. Another change in the look and functionality in Miro is the playback mode. When viewing a video the sidebar is no longer visible. This is a a good improvement because it was useless before when a video was playing because any interaction with the sidebar would stop the current playing video. If you detach the video window you can manipulate the sidebar and its contents. . Since Miro uses xulrunner to display the guide you can also use it to view other web pages like Hulu. Unfortunately I can't get this to work because Miro won't recognize my flash plugin for some reason. It's possible it has something to do with my setup but I haven't looked too hard into it yet. It would be better if they could integrate Hulu channels and video directly into Miro but there might be some technical or licensing issues with that.

Now let's take a look at some of the bad, or more accurately, the ugly. The previous version didn't use many native GTK widgets. The only native GTK looking part of the previous version was the media controls. Now it is one of the few parts that does not respect the native GTK theme. The controls now have an iTunes-ish look. The GTK theming definitely isn't perfect either. I use a dark theme and while most applications I use now work with a dark theme without a hitch the new Miro is problematic. The text details for videos is the same color as the background and isn't readable with my theme unless the selection is highlighted and even then the text has a very low contrast with the background.

Overall I like the new Miro. I was getting tired of dealing with latency issues and the fact that it wouldn't work for me without an ancient version of openssl. That's all taken care of now and for the most part I like the new look, or at least the direction it is going in but it needs some polish. I am completely happy with the way it works though which even more important. For those of you who want to play around with new Miro here is an ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro-2.0.ebuild

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed

Miro 2.0... the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

First lets start with the good news. The gui is much more responsive. Interacting with the sidebar is a smoother experience. With previous releases it was possible to lock up the entire application for seconds at a time when selecting a new channel or trying to play a video. All of that has been fixed. Switching channels and videos is now seamless and instantaneous. Not only has the underlying code obviously been reworked but the look and feel has been overhauled too. It fits in with my GNOME desktop better than before now that Miro seems to use more GTK elements. Another change in the look and functionality in Miro is the playback mode. When viewing a video the sidebar is no longer visible. This is a a good improvement because it was useless before when a video was playing because any interaction with the sidebar would stop the current playing video. If you detach the video window you can manipulate the sidebar and its contents. . Since Miro uses xulrunner to display the guide you can also use it to view other web pages like Hulu. Unfortunately I can't get this to work because Miro won't recognize my flash plugin for some reason. It's possible it has something to do with my setup but I haven't looked too hard into it yet. It would be better if they could integrate Hulu channels and video directly into Miro but there might be some technical or licensing issues with that.

Now let's take a look at some of the bad, or more accurately, the ugly. The previous version didn't use many native GTK widgets. The only native GTK looking part of the previous version was the media controls. Now it is one of the few parts that does not respect the native GTK theme. The controls now have an iTunes-ish look. The GTK theming definitely isn't perfect either. I use a dark theme and while most applications I use now work with a dark theme without a hitch the new Miro is problematic. The text details for videos is the same color as the background and isn't readable with my theme unless the selection is highlighted and even then the text has a very low contrast with the background.

Overall I like the new Miro. I was getting tired of dealing with latency issues and the fact that it wouldn't work for me without an ancient version of openssl. That's all taken care of now and for the most part I like the new look, or at least the direction it is going in but it needs some polish. I am completely happy with the way it works though which even more important. For those of you who want to play around with new Miro here is an ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro-2.0.ebuild

Watch TV on the internet with Miro

If you haven't heard of it yet Miro is an opensource internet TV application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses RSS feeds to grab torrents and then downloads them for viewing. There are is also a guide to watch free television but what if you want to watch a show that isn't in the guide? There is an easy workaround that should be familiar to you if you use bittorrent already, it's called Mininova.

First you need to navigate to Mininova and search for the show you want to watch. I will use the Daily Show as an example. You will get a list like this:


Click on any actual Daily Show episode. Notice that some results that are displayed are for other shows. When you do click on a torrent it will load another page with links like this at the top of the page:



Click on the show title, in this case "The Daily Show". This will load another page that prominently displays an orange RSS feed link:



Now open Miro and and from the toolbar menu choose Channels->Add a new channel. Use the rss feed for the show you searched for as the URL. That's it. Now you have a channel in Miro that will automatically download the latest feeds.

There are a couple of things to note. While this works quite well for me it isn't without issues. You will tend to get multiple of the same episodes because of the nature of a bittorrent search site. Also Miro isn't exaclty light on resources and it is a bit buggy to boot. The good news, at least for linux users, is that Banshee is going to be incorpoarting the same technology into their 1.4 release due out in September. If you haven't used it Banshee is one of the best media players for Linux and after the aforementioned 1.4 release I believe it will be the best media player hands down on any platform.

For Gentoo users out there here is an ebuild for the latest version of Miro (1.2.6) that I adapted from an ebuild for version 1.2.4 found on the net:

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/miro-1.2.6.ebuild

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/setup.py.patch

/usr/local/portage/media-tv/miro/files/MozillaBrowser.sed