www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways (including bittorrent) and can keep the files online indefinitely. A Debian machine connected to the net could be a cheap implementation of my watching while waiting idea for showing interesting and educational TV in waiting areas for hospitals etc [2]. When I first checked out the getmiro.com site it only seemed to have binaries for Mac OS/X and Windows. But now I realise that it’s been in Debian since 11 Sep 2007 under the name Miro and since 12 Jun 2006 under the name Democracyplayer. I have only briefly played with Miro (just checked the channel list) and it seems quite neat so far. I wish I had tried this years ago. Good work Uwe Hermann!
I hope that the Miro player will allow me to more easily search the TED archives. Currently I find the TED site painful to use, a large part of this is slow Javascript which makes each page take an unreasonable delay before it allows me to do anything. I am not planning to upgrade my laptop to a dual-core 64bit machine just to allow Firefox to render badly written web pages.
Biella recently wrote about the Miro player and gave a link to a documentary about Monsanto [3].
One thing I really like about this trend towards publishing documentaries on the net is that they can be cited as references in blog posts. I’ve seen many blog posts that reference documentaries that I can’t reasonably watch (they were shown on TV stations in other countries and even starting to try tracking them down was more trouble than it was worth). Also when writing my own posts I try and restrict myself to using primary sources that are easy to verify, this means only the most popular documentaries.