Miro
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Sony Xperia miro unveiled ahead of time, light on details
The Xperia miro's moved up its coming-out party a whole nine days thanks to Sony Mobile's Facebook campaign. Loaded with ICS, the phone is outfitted with a 3.5-inch display, 5-megapixel camera, a front-facing "chat cam" and comes in shades of black, gold, pink and silver. Integrated Facebook features and customizable illuminations are also promised, but the lid hasn't been lifted on more detailed specs. As of now, the social-minded phone is only slated for release in Europe, but look out below for some additional glamour shots or head past the break for the video unveiling.%Gallery-158151%
Vision Research unveils compact, super slo-mo Miro M110, M120 and M310 cams
Of all the cinematographic tricks in the book, few are as effective and primal as super slo-mo, and few names are as synonymous with the time-stretching tech as Vision Research. The company behind the famous Phantom is refreshing its line of more compact high-speed shooters with the Miro M110, M310 and M120. The 110 and 310 are both one megapixel affairs, with a 1200 x 800 CMOS sensor. The 110 tops out at 1,600fps at full resolution, but cutting down the image quality allows you to bump that rate up to 400,000fps. The M310 is even faster, hitting 3,200fps at its highest quality setting and reaching a mind-boggling 650,000 fps when dialed back -- making a single second last hours. The M120 offers up to 730fps at a full resolution of 1920 x 1200, but using the more standard 1920 x 1080 adds another 70fps, while subsequent drops in pixel count allow it to reach 200,000fps. Don't expect to capture your next student film or backyard wrestling match on one of these though, they're expected to start at $25,000 when they launch in January 2012. Check out the PR after the break.
Miro 4 bumps up media management & Android sync
The Mac media management application formerly known as Democracy Player has been around for a good while; since 2007, it's been called Miro and has offered solid podcatching, BitTorrent and video viewing features in a convenient open-source application. The current version of the app, 4.0.1, rolls the media library features of iTunes, the codec support of VLC and conversion capabilites of Handbrake into a single application. Miro can import your iTunes library automatically and lets you convert downloaded media into an MP4 or H.264 format compatible with your iOS device. You can also use Miro to download media directly from YouTube, a podcast feed, Amazon, BitTorrent and more. Mac users with an Android handset can sync to Miro and make purchases from the Android Market and the Amazon AppStore for Android. Miro is open source, free and available for OS X, Windows, and Linux. An iPad version is in the works and should be available soon. [hat tip 9to5Mac]
Download, play, and convert most video formats with Miro
Apple's built-in QuickTime video player is fine if all you ever want to watch are files in the limited number of formats that it supports. However, if you need to playback files that are encoded in Xvid, DivX, WebM, or even the dreaded FLV, you'll need something with a bit more capability. VLC is one choice that works great for playback of all of these various formats, but the Miro player has just been bumped to version 3.5, and it offers a number of capabilities that VLC can't match. In addition to being a multi-format video player, Miro is also a BitTorrent client that can subscribe to video feeds, automatically download new episodes, and add them to your library. Miro lets you organize your video content, create playlists, and automatically delete shows that have been watched. There is even a built-in conversion tool that can export to MP3, MP4, Ogg Theora, or Ogg Vorbis, with presets to support both Apple and Android devices and the Sony PSP. Miro is open source and comes in OS X, Windows, and Linux versions. [via Download Squad]
Miro 2.0 revamps interface and improves performance
Miro, the open-source video client and podcatcher, has hit version 2.0. In addition to a revamped interface and various performance improvements in viewing and downloading, the new version also adds support for streaming shows on Hulu, CBS, etc. as well as audio podcasts.As before Miro features a comprehensive content guide, YouTube downloading, and a built-in bittorrent client. Although you can cobble together most of Miro's functionality with other software, perhaps its biggest advantage is bringing together a bunch of disparate video sources from around the internet (many of them in HD) and putting them in a single, convenient interface. Miro is a free download from the Participatory Culture Foundation.
Miro 1.0
If you're into videoblogging, and it would seem that everyone is these days, then you have to check out Miro (you may know it as Democracy player). Billed as 'groundbreaking Internet TV software,' Miro 1.0, which was released yesterday, allows you to search, subscribe to, and view any number of video podcasts. A handy guide is built right into the client so you'll never be without content, but if you can't find something that strikes your fancy there the ability to search across a number of video sharing sites is also baked right into the app.Miro allows you to organize your subscriptions in channels, create playlists, and much more. Miro, as you might expect, is free and requires OS X 10.3 (though 10.4 is required to play some videos). A Windows and Linux client is available as well, but who uses those platforms anymore?
Democracy Player now Miro
Back in March, the Participatory Culture Foundation announced that Democracy Player would be renamed as Miro, and the change is now official with a new release of the internet video player software, version 0.9.8 . The application's image has been totally revamped, including an overhaul of the official website and logo (of course), but the new technical preview version of Miro includes a dose of new additions and fixes, too: Keyboard shortcuts available on all platforms New 'report a bug' menu item added Veoh.com as a search engine added Additonal bug fixes and UI improvements Miro 0.9.8 requires Mac OS X 10.3+ and QuickTime 7. Check out a demo of the software in action here.
Democracy Player changes name to 'Miro'
What's in a name? Lots of things, including the difference between confusing and creating potential users of your application, apparently. That's why the Participatory Culture Foundation is renaming Democracy Player, its open source internet television surfing program, despite sticking with the original name for over a year. "Our early Mac beta versions of Democracy Player were called 'DTV'– we didn't think that we could be 'Democracy' until we had something substantial to offer... In all our debates about whether you could call something 'Democracy' and how people would react to the name, we hadn't realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics."With that, the new name will be Miro, and a there's a lesson to be learned here in the meantime: if you've got a potentially creative, but ultimately too symbolic and image-burdened name for your software, think twice about it. You can't always expect casual users to look beyond the name of an application to see its real use. Anyway, check out the official word from the folks themselves to get the full lowdown.
