Democracy – The Free And Open Source Internet TV Software
Posted on 13 March 2007 by Stuart
With Video and social networking being noted as the success stories of 2006 here at P2PViNE we thought it would be nice to point out a great piece of video viewing software called Democracy.
Democracy is a free and open source software application for viewing a wide range of video formats on your home PC. But wait, Democracy does so much more than just play your current videos in nearly any format 
Some of the Democracy Features
- Play All Your Videos
Play virtually any video– Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Browse your collection, make playlists, stay organized. - Get Internet TV Shows
Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Explore over 1,000 free channels with the built-in Channel Guide. - Search YouTube
Download and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and other sites. - High Definition and Fullscreen
Your computer screen is a high-def display. Watch free HD videos in gorgeous fullscreen. - Torrent Power
Easily download any BitTorrent file. Fast. Then watch it in the same app. Simple.
As you can see Democracy is loaded with great features that make the software very useable and all for free. Lets learn a little more about the application and how it works.
The Actual Democracy Player is a powerful TV viewer that downloads, manages and plays the latest videos on your computer. There’s no need to squint– the Democracy Player can play the highest quality videos in full-screen, and will play them one after the other, just lean back and enjoy.
You can Search for videos from YouTube, Google Video, Revver, and more directly from the application. Better yet, turn a keyword search into a channel with the “Add This Search as a Channel” button. Democracy will automatically watch for new videos tagged with your keyword — when new material is found, it’ll be downloaded and waiting for you. You can also easily find videos inside your collection and channels with the search field at the top of the screen.
You can also add channels manually with “Channels > Add Channel” (Ctrl+N). Just paste in the URL from webpages with video or RSS video feeds and Democracy Player will handle the rest. If you want to unsubscribe from a channel, just right-click on the channel’s name and select “remove” (you can re-subscribe anytime).
The “New Videos” feature makes Democracy Player into a simple TV-viewing application. Whenever a new video is downloaded to your computer, it is added to this list. You can browse and manually pick certain videos to watch from the list. Click the video at the top and all new videos will play in order, one after the other. When you’re done watching your new videos, you can choose to save them by clicking on the “Save” button to the right of the video description. If you don’t do anything, the videos will automatically expire after a set time (6 days by default) freeing up space for fresh videos. You can always re-download videos that expire.
Auto-downloading makes using Democracy Player really simple. When enabled, the Democracy Player will grab new videos from a channel as soon as they’re available. You can turn auto-download on for any channel by checking the box off at the top of the channel view. As soon as you know you like a channel, there is no need to think about it again; let Democracy Player handle the downloading.
Creating playlists of your favorite videos is simple. Just drag any video you’ve downloaded onto a playlist in the sidebar. You can rearrange the order of videos inside a playlist by dragging them up and down. To create a new playlist, choose Playlists > New Playlist (apple+P).
You can also tell friends about videos and channels you like is really easy in Democracy Player. When you click on the envelope button for a given video or channel, Democracy Player opens up Video Bomb’s share page. Also, you can “star” videos you like and Video Bomb will automatically create your own personal feed of favorites. Pass your Video Bomb channel around — you are a filter for your friends’ media.
You can download the Democracy Player from http://www.getdemocracy.com
Once the Democracy Player downloads to your computer, install it and start it up. You will see the channels that come pre-subscribed with the player, and you can subscribe to new channels in the Guide. Hit play on New Videos and any new videos will play one after the other.
P2PViNE Summary
Democracy is a very capable application and most users will be able to customize the settings to their satisfaction. The RSS feature for video podcasts is somthing i will be using regularly since testing Democracy. The actual File Download times were also very good when we tested often maxing out our 10MB connection, this was nice as we hate waiting for downloads.
All in all Democracy is a very good application and should get better by the day being open source. We would urge you all to give it a try
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