No, I know how to spell I. I just thought it’d be more interesting if I wrote it up like this, haha. Anyway, lately I’ve been getting back into the whole Internet TV thing and found a nice competitor to Joost, called Miro. Apparently, it’s been considered the Firefox of Internet TV. That’s a huge name to live up to.

I would thought that Miro’s installer came in quite a decent, acceptable size at 24.5mb. I’ve heard rumours of it being bloatware, but I figure that Miro 1.2 has stepped up the game a bit. Installation on my Vista machine was a breeze, and within five minutes of the whole process I was ready to go.

Why I tried Miro

Lately, I’ve been finding Joost very unresponsive and sluggish. To be honest, this is the case with many pieces of software out there – however, this is absolutely unacceptable when it comes to watching media, when I transform from the logical-minded blogger into the irrational, emotional, human being just enjoying a good video.

Miro works very differently in comparison to Joost – where Joost streams videos (and there might lie the problem), Miro downloads them – and even though I’ll admit it takes a while longer to download, it’s much more responsive overall and thus I can admire and appreciate that. Plus, an added goodie – some clips that are downloaded are already in .mp4 format and so can be put on my iPod Video (Glassy) for additional viewing.

Also, Miro acts as a medium for playing clips that can be found on huge video networks such as Youtube and Veoh. The quality isn’t that great, but there’s definitely a lot more material available. Ahh, so many clips to choose from.

Does it Work?

It sure does – pretty darn smoothly, in fact. I was able to download a few of their HD clips from their servers in less than half a minute, which is a great, fast time. Not as fast as real TV, but a hell of a lot faster than Joost was for me. Also, thanks to my widescreen format, the videos fit pretty nicely onto the screen – but shucks, not on the iPod’s.

There’s a huge variety of stuff available – from the tech-savvy channels to discovery. The content is interesting if the subject floats your boat, and they’re all pretty good quality.

The other movie clips you decide to download from Youtube and Veoh take an amazingly long time though – for their small sizes, they’re very sluggish (around 30.1kb/s). I’m definitely not impressed, but this can’t be helped by Miro because they have nothing to do with such a speed – they’re just the mediums, after all.

At the moment, I haven’t gone through Channels yet, but I’ll be adding that to the article soon enough.

Another interesting aspect of Miro – you can upload your own channel on there! Now I’m not sure if CutEdge is going to have its own RSS video feed on Miro anytime soon, but for all you aspiring directors and/or producers, this is a great opportunity for all of you.

Conclusion

Miro – if you’ve got more than 3Mbps connection, I’ll definitely recommend you get it. However, if you’re on the lower end of the spectrum, I suggest that you leave your computer on at night to download some of this stuff. If you haven’t got cable television (or digital cable) or just want high-quality videos to download to your computer or iPod for viewing, give Miro a try!

Visit:

http://www.getmiro.com/

http://www.getmiro.com/create/

Apparently so, according to Dailytech.  The latest version of SlySoft AnyDVD HD came with the ability to rip the Blu-ray DVD’s movie in high-def.  As both a tech enthusiast and a pretty stereotypical asian, I must say that I’m pretty interested in such a piece of news.  However, let it be known that I don’t pirate.  After all, if I started pirating, it could wreck the delicate balance between the two worlds of legitimacy and piracy.

Source: http://img.infotropic.com/i/061224_1g.jpg

What does this mean?  Since Blu-Ray’s defense has been cracked before, I suppose that Sony will be forced to invent a third method of encrypting the data.  And they’ll have to do it soon – because if they let this go as rampant as the forging of fake DVDs do, the Blu-Ray market will be saturated with cheap, fake copies of movies in their original high-definition format.  What a nightmare for the movie industry.

As a loyal movie fan (not a fanatic, just a fan), I suggest that you be very careful about which side you decide to take.  Sure, the piracy might seem much more affordable, but if everyone thought like that on a larger scale, we wouldn’t have any new movies to watch because the companies would all go broke.  They’re still fatcats – for now, but let’s face it: they’re not as fat as they once used to be.