I’ve discovered a new pastime – Internet TV courtesy of the Participatory Culture Foundation’s “Democracy Player” software. It lets you subscribe to video feeds (“channels”), and obviously play them back after they’ve downloaded. So this is definitely something for which you want to have uncapped broadband!
My favourite channel so far has got to be Terra, a nature documentary series. It stands out from the crowd for being close to TV production quality – real, interesting documentaries, for free. Lots of the other channels are just computer geeks with a camera and no producer in sight, so I tend to avoid them. The daily Rocketboom is also fantastic, and worth subscribing to. While most channels are available elsewhere (on YouTube or wherever), it’s much better to subscribe to them all in Democracy Player, let the high-quality versions download, and watch them when you want.
A quick work about the software – for me, it crashes all the time. It crashes between videos. It crashes on startup, it crashes on closing, it crashes while browsing the channel guide. It’s by far the least stable and least polished piece of software that I use. It’s a little bit rubbish. But it’s completely worth putting up with for the content – from documentaries to comedy to music videos to current affairs. Try it – it’s open source, and all the channels are free.
Read on for my list of recommended channels.
All the channels I’m subscribed to, as urls for pasting into the “Add Channel” dialog.
- http://www.diveintomark.org/feed/
- http://www.motamorfosis.com/bm/rss.php?i=2
- http://www.mediarights.org/bm/rss.php?i=1
- http://www.pcgamerpodcast.com/video/?feed=rss2
- http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/quicktime_daily_enclosures.xml
- http://www.telemusicvision.com/videos/rss.php?i=1
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/Terravideos
- http://podcast.rickygervais.com/podcast.xml
- http://www.thirteenrec.com/bm/rss.php?i=2
- http://treehugger.com/tv/index.xml
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/oldeenglish/
- http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/index.xml
- http://makezine.com/blog/archive/make_podcast/index.xml
Has anyone found any other great channels? Post them in the comments.
Hi— this is Nicholas Reville, I’m the director at PCF, we make Democracy Player. Thanks for writing about us!
I wanted to ask you if you have any more details about the crashes that you’re seeing. Do you see any error messages? What kind of system are you on? Most importantly, are you using the latest version (0.9.0.2)? We’d love to fix any problems you’re seeing (send me an email if you get a chance).
Also, you can turn that list of links that you have into a list of 1-click subscribe buttons, by using this page: http://subscribe.getdemocracy.com
I’m using 0.9.0 on Kubuntu Dapper. I had previously been using 0.8.something, but after the upgrade things got worse, so I moved aside the .democracy folder, and it improved a bit.
Specifically, I got bitten by bug #3161 for every page on the channel guide, despite having a prefs.js with all the important things (as described in bug #3159). Moving aside .democracy solved this, so I’m not sure what happened here.
The crashes are more accurately described as hangs, in that the application stops responding , and I click the close button on the WM to bring up the WM terminate application dialog, and start again. I’ve tried launching from the console to see if there is anything written to STDERR, but no luck. Mostly it is when finishing videos (never actually during playback), but occaisionally on launch after the video controls have been painted, but before the sidebar has been shown.
If you’ve any suggestions (further to upgrading to the minor release mentioned) for ways that I can help troubleshoot, I’ll try to help. I don’t want to fill your Trac with lots of “Oh, look, it crashed and I have nothing useful to say about it” reports though!