Democracy Player is 0.9.2 and Growing Up Fast

Dean writes "Democracy Player, the open source answer for RSS video aggregation/playback, has just made it to 0.9.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you haven't tried Democracy Player for a while, it's time to try it again. The application is more responsive and stable, uses less memory, integrates Bittorrent, and can now play Flash videos (including stuff from YouTube, Google, Yahoo, etc). Democracy takes all the hassle out of finding and watching videos from your favorite sources." In many ways, Democracy is the template of what I'd like to see out of Apple's upcoming iTV. Although my guess is that it will be more like MythTV- only for people willing to put in the effort.

XUL versus My Memory

[sbrown123]

I tried it out. I quickly noticed it was using XUL. XUL apps, like Firefox and Thunderbird, *each* consume large amounts of my computer's memory. They need to come up with a shared, one time loaded XUL library for XUL apps.

iTV?

[Wabin]

What the hell is the comment about iTV in there for? iTV is hardware for viewing video, Democracy is software for finding/downloading it. I don't know how they will be comparable at all. Furthermore, Apple's track record is precisely one of making easy to use systems. The idea that it would require anything like the effort needed for MythTV is pretty out of line. More likely it will be like the iTunes store. Easy to use, but limited. (If we must compare, MythTV is more of a challenge to use, but far less limited)

Re:XUL versus My Memory

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Is it really that bad? Firefox and Thunderbird generally consume 50-75MB for me. Memory is pretty cheap now, so if XUL is what is needed to quickly develop powerful and flexible apps, then I'm all for it.

Freedom is fucking ugly. But that's its beauty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at usenet. As soon as anyone could use it with low barriers to entry there were enough people there to attack spam and trolls and all of the rest of it.

USENET represents the closest venue we have for true and complete freedom of expression. People can post about virtually any idea, concept, thought or belief. They can transmit image and video data. In short, it's the freest place we have. And as a result, there will be stuff there that boils your blood, and makes you want to shit your pants. That's what freedom of expression is all about. It's about seeing spam, viewing pictures of Goatse's gaping anus, and reading about how the TCO of Windows is less than that of Linux. And as much as we may hate such ideas, we have to be thankful that we have the freedom to read them, and somebody else had the freedom to post them.

Here's what stopped me

[wrook]

I gave this a try, thinking "This might be useful for me to keep up with my anime". However, it's still got a way to go before I will use this app. Here's what's stopping me.

1) My Content: You can select a directory that contains video content that you already have on your machine during configuration. But you only get to select one directory. After you select that directory, you don't seem to be able to change it.

2)I added animesuki to the "channels". This downloaded the RSS feed and set up roughly 1600 "programs". However it is set by default to start downloading *all* of them. After scrambling around I stopped them. This is a BAD default.

3)As far as I can tell, I can't specify which "programs" on a "channel" I want to download. It's all or nothing. I want to input a regexp here (seems like an unlikely feature for this app, though...)

4)I tried to play 2 files that I already had downloaded (REC and Touch). REC crashed the Democracy player. Touch played audio for about 3 seconds before hanging. Both of these are AVI packages with Mpeg4 codecs...

So, while interesting, I think I'll wait until it's a bit more mature...

They're saying the Java plugin causes problems

[Master of Transhuman]

Great - they recommend uninstalling Java to use it.

Right. Brilliant.

How about going back to the drawing board and fixing the problem BEFORE releasing a crippled product? Ever occur to anybody on the project?

I hope this thing works better than Amarok which for no known or apparent reason just died on my Kubuntu. And Juk, which I tried as a replacement, wouldn't play anything at all. I'm back to using Kaffeine as my audio player as well as my video player.

Can anybody in the IT industry write code that actually works? Anybody? Anybody at all?