I downloaded the official non-beta release of Miro the other day, and have been really impressed! It’s basically a free, multi-platform video player where you choose from a library of channels. The channels are so varied, from National Geographic, to the Onion and Adult Swim. You subscribe to a channel, then you can download (or auto-download) episodes of that channel. It uses bittorrent as the download mechanism, so the distribution is shared. It’s kind of a neat way to present bittorent video.

Another cool thing is that you can add any folder from your computer as a channel. So, I can add our shared network drive that has all of our dorama on it, and they will appear in Miro. This has me thinking of building a cheap box and hook it up to our LCD and using Miro as the video player…

The UI is attractive, but there are a couple little things that annoy me. For instance, when adding a subscription, it takes you to the channel page, but it is not easy to “go back” one click to the browse page. They need a back button, or even a breadcrumb like iTunes Store. It’s actually easier to add channels from their website in a browser. Although there is the ability to export your channel list (OPML), they should have an option to have the list linked to your account. (Signing up for an account is totally optional) That way I can sync with multiple computers. Also, it has crashed my Ubuntu machine twice. It’s the only app to ever crash that system. Hopefully an update will fix that issue. Lastly, even though you can add local video files to Miro, there seems to be a bug that all folders aren’t showing up as channels correctly. They show up in the Library just fine, but not in their little channels.

I guess we should expect these problems since it is just out of beta, but I am hoping that they will be fixed shortly. Otherwise, Miro is a nice way to watch videos on your computer.