I’ve always been an advocate for cutting subscription costs out of my life: I guess I just don’t like the idea of having to constantly pay for a service — which won’t be there when you run out of money.  The only essential I’ve never really even considered cutting was cable TV, perhaps because there’s really nothing like it.  At least, there wasn’t — before Miro was introduced.

Miro is an application that is reminiscent of PVR: using the Miro Guide, you can subscribe to channels that you want to watch.  Episodes will be downloaded regularly via RSS feeds, and quality is not compromised because the actual video is being downloaded, not streamed.  Download speeds are impressive for me, but will depend on your Internet service’s download speed.  The best part about having the videos downloaded is the ability to play them more than once and pause them when you need to.  Just like PVR.

The GUI is impressively laid out: very simple, and colourful, but without overdoing it.  The word I’d like to bring out is “pleasant” — in fact, it somewhat reminds me of Mac OS X’s GUI a bit.

The Search function also contributes to Miro’s wow-factor: it allows you to download videos from YouTube, Veoh, and other video sites.  However, as of version 1.2, it was a bit slow when reloading different searches.  The search function does allow you to save the results as a Channel though, interestingly enough.

And the videos: there is quality, and much potential.  However, at the moment, the shows are somewhat less mainstream: I would expect that eventually, mainstream shows like Heroes and even music videos and all will be put on Miro, just as Joost is proceeding to do.  Still, there’s plenty of fun and games with Boing Boing TV, GeekBrief, and even National Geographic.

I know I had taken an earlier look at Miro, but I totally felt like it deserved a second revealing.  Alright, I’ll admit it: I forgot that I had already looked at Miro (grins sheepishly).  Still, it’s a great piece of software and totally out of Beta, so you should give it a try!  If you’ve got the storage and the Internet speed, then what are you waiting for?

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/