Falling for the Boing Boing hype I tried out the Miro (formerly ‘Democracy’) video/’internet TV’ player yesterday. I was interested by the promise of an iTunes like organiser for my increasing number of video files. My trial lasted for about 5 or 6 minutes. I subscribed to the TED talks feed, fine. Then I pointed it to my video directory to index it all and then I waited… and waited… and thought about it… and waited. Then I tried to quit as it was slowing everything down, then I tried again and again before finally doing a force quit on it and dragging it into the trash. In short it seemed more iPhoto than iTunes. Seriously who would leave this thing running in the background at all times?

I think the problem may be more than performance issues though. The fact is that whilst I’d like a way to organise my video files a bit more neatly (though I’m pretty neat anyway) maybe a bit of meta-data, length, title, imdb link perhaps none of that’s really important. I don’t really need anything more than VLC (which handles Democracy’s video playback anyway). I never feel like I’m wasting time when I drag the next episode of Battlestar Galactica onto the playlist (other than the feeling that I might be wasting time by watching the damn show, not a software issue (that octagonal paper is still really bugging me) best line in the series so far “you tried to stab me in the neck with my own pen! And you missed!… Butterfingers” the ending of season 3 is just totally insane though).

Anyway, hopefully Miro will mature into something really useful but for now I think they may be on the wrong path so I’m sticking with VLC.

Also, I saw the trailer for the new film of “I Am Legend” last night and it actually looks pretty cool In a kind of Speilberg version of War of the Worlds way (which I really enjoyed) though checking IMDB the directors track record is a bit iffy.