In our first interview with Matt Brett, we briefly touched on a project he is a part of that had recently launched, called the Democracy Player.
Democracy is a video player of sorts, that utilizes rss feeds to extract video files from certain sites, and allows the user to download and play those files through it’s interface. Weighing in at around 17 MB, we take a look at Democracy in it’s early months.
Early Beginnings
In Democracy’s short time, it has grown and made a number of improvements. The interface features a Itunes and Songbird like appearance, in a striking black. The core of the player is designed to be easy to use, while clean at the same time, and it accomplishes that just fine.
The program starts up by loading the Channel Guide, a quick look through some of Democracy’s most popular videos of that given time. From here, you can browse the top videos, or search for your own.
Subscibe – To Videos?
By using rss, Democracy offers users the chance to subscribe to a station, allowing for the program to automatically download new videos as they are released. This turns Democracy into a TiVo of sorts, so you can sit back and let Democracy do the work.
Ease of Downloads
Downloading through Democracy is also super easy. Democracy integrates Bittorrent, allowing downloads to be fast and accurate. Once a download is complete, you can head over to the “New Videos” tab to watch it for the first time, where it will then be moved to your “My Collections” tab.
Full Screen Videos
Finally, you get to the goods – the chance to watch the video you just spent time downloading. One press of play, and the player enlarges the video to full screen. Usuing simple player controls (stop, pause, play, volume, etc), the video is controlled. Not overlly advanced, by gets the job done. Even videos with low quality appear to come out alright in full screen playback. A big plus.
Open Source
The greatest thing of all about Democracy is it’s fully open source. Democracy is still new, and there our a lot more that has to be done before it becomes and ultimate piece of software, but it is slowly making it there, and by being open source, Democracy has the chance to excel into something great. Internet TV and Democracy will soon go hand in hand. Democracy is definitely leading a revolution.
