Miro 1.2.4

Providing one-stop shopping for all your video needs, open-source Miro deserves much of the praise that's been heaped upon it.

The concept is brilliant, yet simple: create a video player that can subscribe to and download video podcasts while comprehensively managing your saved videos. On the face of it, this might sound like iTunes, but the sharing component is an essential aspect of the program. Miro has always been geared toward video and it shows in the program's design. When you launch the app, a left sidebar hosts a folder tree for managing your videos. The central pane does double duty for viewing videos and searching for new ones. The bottom hosts a search box for parsing through Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and others, a video control panel, and a volume control.

Features include full torrent support, so you can download and view torrents in the same app; folder watching to manage only the hard-drive folders you specify for new videos; resumable playback; channel surfing, which organizes video feeds by topic; video sharing and hosting; and assistance in creating videos.