Today.. it’s all about the software.

Democracy Player
Tag : The free and open source internet TV platform

So, Democracy Player is a amalgamation of Channel Guide, staight http downloader, BitTorrent Client, File organiser and Video Player all rolled into one Python application. From what I can tell it borrows from VLC, Mozilla’s Gecko and Xine to help with displaying the guide and displaying the videos. It’s cross platform with pre-built clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and source code freely available.

Pros : The channel guide is excellent and well integrated with the player with one click subscriptions and it lists things pretty much where you’d expect them to be and with over 1,000 shows available and all completely free you can’t really complain that there’s nothing for you.

The player is slick looking. It fits in well with GTK desktops on Linux, picking up your theme and although I will admit it looks a lot nicer in the Windows black theme it’s a pretty pleasing looker. The widgets are pretty and the layout is just how you’d imagine it would be with a channel bar, video controls and content in the right places.

The organisation of videos is excellent, acting like a Tivo in that it will remove your older shows after they have expired so that you never run out of space.

It’s hooked into BitTorrent which can only be good for those distributing the video files as it alleviates the weight off of their bandwidth.

Cons : Saying it’s unstable is probably being a little too generous. Whilst it is a beta program and not even hit a version 1 release yet and maybe I am a little too expecting of software these days when people can bring out such good first releases. It is, however, that unstable that if there was a similar program I would be using it. Either the feeds don’t appear in the sidebar properly or the program crashes without warning when adding certain channels or some other odd error.

Slow. Again, I’m being too kind. I know it’s running a top of Python which in itself is a high level language. But really I think they could do better.

Downloading. It doesn’t support resuming for most files. When you’re downloading 300MB high def quality shows like I do and when you have a shitty ADSL connection like I do it’s not what you want to have files have to restart at the beginning.

Video Player. Although I like the fact that the video player is built in I think I’d much prefer it to send to an external video player. Because I’m a keyboard guy and the keyboard shortcuts for the video player are non-existent almost. Also, whenver you change tab to look at download progress or to review your channels it stops the video, I think a much better solution would be to either have it shrink the TV to the bottom corner and overlay the details a la Virgin STBs or pause the video. Stopping my video half the way through an hour show, not fun.

jUploadr
Tag : jUploadr is a cross platform, cross-site Photo uploader.

Basically jUploadr automates uploading of your photos to (currently) two of the biggest social photo sites out there. Flickr and Zoomr. It allows you to upload these without having to go to the webpage, without having to select 10 photos at a time and without having to fiddle with tag/description/size/rotation settings after you’ve uploaded.

Pros : It’s pretty, it really is. It’s well designed, it’s simple and yet powerful. I normally love things that have 16,000 configuration options and that’s the reason I run KDE over Gnome. But this is one of them times when “it just works ™”

It’s so easy to use. All you do is drag the photo(s) from an open file manager window it appears in the Upload window. Right click add tags, it will auto-complete if it’s a previously used one, add a title/description and rotate the photo to your heart’s desire. You can also right click and automatically add it to one of your existing “sets” or create a new one on the fly. This alone saves me going into the ever slow Flickr application for arranging photo sets.

Cons : The only real con I have is that it’s a little slow off the mark sometimes as it’s a Java program. Other than that it does everything right and I’ve never had it crash on me!

So, download and post many, many picture which are no doubt better than mine..

downloading the internet for free since 1993
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