FreeCulture TV and Yes We're Open: Two new free and open Internet TV channels
Parker sez,
New Channels: Free Culture TV and Yes, We’re Open! (Thanks, Parker!)
I'm a summer intern at the Participatory Culture Foundation, who make Miro, and I just launched two new channels that Boing Boing readers might enjoy:Free Culture TV is all videos about free culture and the copyfight. Check out cool documentaries, videos of lectures or CC Salon discussions, that kind of thing.
Yes, We're Open! Free Movies, Music Videos, and TV (catchy title, eh?) is all openly licensed entertainment... Movies, shorts, music videos, all kinds of fun stuff.
You can subscribe to either or both of these channels in any RSS reader that can handle video and torrent attachments, but they're built for Miro.
(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer for Miro's board of directors)
the latest
latest episodes
I appreciate Miro for what it is, but until there is a -no auto download of any content- button, I won't use it. Until then, I'll stick with VLC, Miro's capable and non-presumptuous predecessor.
Programming looks great though.
Ooo Sounds Shiny... should be good for some early morning giggles.
Thanks
Is it free as in freedom or as in "no fee". IOW can we do anything we want with the content we download?
#1 - um... open any channel, under the name in big text: AUTO DOWNLOAD - ALL, NEW, OFF...
Simple.
MDHatter, Exactly!
Miro seems like great technology, but everytime I turn my back on it, it seems to be downloading some shit I don't want.
Maybe there is an easy way to avoid this, I never stick around long enough to find out. I give Miro a whirl every 6 months to remember why I dislike it so much. Sure enough, after 20 or 25 minutes use, I'll be turning it off for another 6 months.
Dog, it's still annoying to have to go through all the channels and implicitly state you don't want 200 things queuing up to eat your bandwidth (and hard drive).
As I said, I download the new version every now and again to see where Miro's at, and to have to go through the 20 or 30 channels, clicking that button, is a shitty way to keep my attention.
One button that says "don't ever download anything, unless I tell you" would be infinitely more useful to me.
I never want anything to auto download, without getting a permission click from me.
?? YOU decide what you're subscribed to - if you don't like it, unsubscribe!
Plus don't auto download as described above, or - go to Options, Downloads and set Maximum number of channel auto-downloads to zero.
Seriously... simple.
I have to conceed you're right though. It'd be easy to include a no auto download button...
boingboing crashes my browser (firefox). every time. in fact, i have to disconnect my dsl and reconnect. strange.
As a UK citizen I am worried about getting threatened by the BPI and my ISP.
Is miro an 'authorised network' and thus legal to download from or it is a 'file-sharing' network which could expose my family to threatening BPI letters from my ISP.
The full text of the letter is at http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/06/06/bpi_letter.pdf
The letter makes it clear I must only download from authorised networks. I don't want to martyr my dads account.
Now maybe I'm not understanding things fully here, but shouldn't a channel about Free Culture be made available for use with any video-streaming software? Why are they locking us in to Miro? Just release it in a streaming video format and put up an rss feed!
Annoying as it is it's still not as annoying as Veoh.
@10; makes it pretty clear: fck BPI nd fck Vrgn
Tak, it ain't just Virgin.
This is the mad New World that we in the UK find ourselves in since the 24th.
The major six ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse) have all signed up to support this initiative.
As yet, there are proposals, but no clear indication of how the details of illegal downloading, apart from gathering IPs from bittorrent and limewire, are to be collected.
If they don't manage to clean up filesharing in the UK (it is currently voluntary) the government will write legislation to the same effect.
Still, every time I hear "fuck Virgin" I have to smile. Oh the delicious irony.
"we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
..yeah, irony has orders of magnitude, huh?
Arkizzle: MDHatter apparently wants the exact opposite of you (you want auto download turned off, MDHatter wants it on), and Miro caters to what both of you want. There's a button at the top of the window for setting a channel to auto-download. There's also a preference to set auto-download as you want. Perhaps you and MDHatter just need more time to see what Miro will do.
#10 - programs listed in Miro channels can come from anyplace on the Internet. Miro is not a mirror site feeding you video/audio data. You should challenge bad laws that make you clear permission before downloading legally available works from somewhere.
#11 - Miro is an RSS feed aggregator built for showing the user a video/audio enclosure. Take a look at the feed list or the links you're pointed to in the BB story. In Miro, right-click on a feed and pick "Copy URL to Clipboard". Now you've got the URL for that channel's feed. Open that with your favorite downloading program and you'll get RSS data. Now, if you were trying to say that the videos pointed to by the feed aren't all in formats anyone can play, you might have a point there. It could be that these channels are merely pointing you to videos encoded in patent-encumbered formats instead of free and open formats such as Ogg Vorbis + Theora.
JB, sorry to be all lazy-web (read: not wanting to download it again to find out), but does the button you mentioned turn off auto-download for all channels in one click? If so, do I still have to set it everytime I subscribe to a new channel?
Also, I think MDHatter was after a "no auto download of any content"-button. That sounds like what I want, but perhaps I've parsed the sentence incorrectly.
What I'm after: One setting, to disable auto-download in all (current and future) channels. No auto download please. Inform me when content is available, like a news reader, and I'll click in it as I see fit.
And thanks for taking the time to address my issue :)
#4 - I saw that.
But when I want to subscribe to a channel to brows the programming, I have to manually turn off the autodownload of each channel individually, requiring several clicks for each channel - to be completed one at a time.
Honestly, it's like MS designed that part of it.
Thanks for the tip, but what I ask for is a single place to disable that. In the Preferences would be nice.
JB, actually Arkizzle nailed it.
Am I not free to use any RSS aggregator I choose? Oh the irony. Where's the RSS feed for non-Miro users? (Yes, I did work it out... but still...)
Very nice! Maybe the project I'm currently co-developing in the Netherlands should create a similar channel? See: http://research.imagesforthefuture.org/open-images-kick-off-meeting/
I forgot about Miro for a while cause it seemed to have a fair few bugs in relation to keeping library data in good shape...at least in my experience.
But really, it's a great app that's obviously maturing and content just keeps getting better...so here we go again.
Here's a channel some might enjoy...Australia's terrific public youth broadcast offering...
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/tv/vodcast/vodcastMp4.xml
MDHatter, Arkizzle: Yes, Miro can do that. Here's how to make Miro do that in version 1.2.4 (r7072) which is relatively recent but not the very latest (it's as recent as my GNU/Linux distribution distributes right now):
- Start up Miro.
- Delete all the channels you don't want (likely the default set of channels) by right-clicking (or perhaps option-click on MacOS) and picking "Remove" then confirming the removal. If any were set to auto-download this will also stop them from downloading (because they'll no longer be subscribed).
- Enter Miro's preferences (Edit->Options, Video->Options, etc. depending on operating system) and go to the Channels tab.
- Set the "Auto download default setting for new channels" to "Off".
- Close the preferences panel (or set other prefs as you like).
- Add channels as you wish.
All the channels you add from now on will default to informing you there's new stuff to get but not actually downloading any of it until you manually intervene. At first everything in the channel will appear as new (of course, it's all new as far as Miro can tell since you just added the channel).
If you grow tired of manually downloading things, you can change the preference setting or you can set visit the channel (click on the channel name) and alter the per-channel setting on the top of the window as desired (auto-download either "none", "new", or "all").
Enjoy.
JB, thanks for that!
Sounds exactly like what I was after. I'll give Miro a look again, to see how it's coming along :)