On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:08 AM, James G. Sack (jim) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That miro looked kind of inviting, so I downloaded it for a trial spin, > and it seemed to work pretty good. Or bad, I suppose, if one were to get > addicted to watching everything "out there".
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I haven't used it in a while (not since it used to be called "Democracy Player"), but it's great for all kinds of video podcasts... both torrents and straight http downloads. > What is really going on there? How is torrent involved? Not all the podcasts in the directory are .torrent feeds; some are just http downloads. Miro is built so that you don't have to know the difference. It appears that Miro automatically sets up BitTorrent distribution via Amazon S3 for all the HD video feeds in the directory. I don't recall the specifics, but I think it throttles torrent upload bandwidth while there's other activity on the machine; more b/w is used when you're idle. In addition, there's a setting somewhere to tell it what share ratio you'd like to achieve on torrents... it defaults to 1.5 (i.e. it goes until it has uploaded 1.5x the amount you downloaded). > I see some > upload traffic when I am downloading, but it doesn't seem enough for > peering (is that the term?). Never more than ~ 20 KB/s up and mostly > much less, maybe 5KB/s. That may either be because Miro is throttling upload speed or just because few people are downloading the file at the time. > There doesn't seem to be much in the way of > either status feedback (about networking) or configuration. That was one of the things I *didn't* like about the software when I used it last; for that reason, I generally prefer to use an actual BitTorrent client when downloading .torrents. Like I said before, the only network configuration I remember from the Democracy Player was a Share Ratio setting, though there may have been download/upload bandwidth cap settings as well. > I do have to say it gives no hint of any codec problems, and has a nice > full-screen option. It has VLC embedded in it for playing the downloaded videos. > And there are some neat categories. Science and > education, of course, but languages might be fun to try. Brad - you > still want to brush up on your German?. Interesting; it now looks like they've got a separate branded player specifically for Deutsche Welle podcasts (http://www.getmiro.com/co-branding/partners.php). I might have to look into that someday, though my educational efforts right now are better spent on sharpening my IT knowledge... -- Brad Beyenhof http://augmentedfourth.com I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ~ Galileo Galilei, astronomer and physicist (1564-1642) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
