Over the past few months I've stumbled onto 2 very useful applications...
- Miro (formerly The Democracy Player) - Video player & discovery application capable of playing almost all common video formats found on the web.
- Songbird - Audio player & discovery application capable of playing almost all common audio formats.
I've been using Miro for the past 6 months and really like it. It allows me discover new video blogs/feeds and automatically downloads and manages them for me. It also seems fairly stable with only a few minor annoyances.
I had heard about Songbird when it was first getting started and figured I would give a try once it got farther on. It has since gone full release (1.1 actually) and the features and performance have been greatly enhanced, allowing it to become my primary audio application. There are still a few quirks (like no ripping capabilites, yet), but I feel confident that it will only get better with time.
The one thing that stikes me about these applications is that neither one could replace iTunes or Windows Media PLayer (WMP). At least, not if they remain separate. They are both built using the Mozilla XUL codebase, use the same processing library for decoding the various audio/video formats, have 'discovery' features, and library management. The only things functionally different are Songbird is geared more for audio while Miro is mostly for video. It seems to me that these applications should reach out to each other and merge into one project and finally create the ultimate (and free) media management application.
