Viddling Around™

Courtesy of our friends at Boing Boing, news it out that a new version of the Democracy Player is available.  For those of you unfamiliar with Democracy, it’s an open-source player that lets you choose from over 500 channels of free videos - in just about any format.   Some of the things I like about the Democracy player is it’s very “cordial” install.  While the player can handle more video formats that you’ve most likely every even heard of, it doesn’t automatically take over your Windows file associations (are you listening Rob Glaser?).   It provides a nice dialog as the 2nd step in the install, and let’s you select which formats you’ll want it to handle - and it doesn’t presume that you’ll want to switch out your existing Windows Media, Quicktime or even Flash playback settings.

Democracy’s all about the viewing experience - so to that end, it focused around letting you shop around through the channels, and then downloading (it even supports torrents) the files locally to your hard drive.   Then you can watch them later, at your liesure, in full screen resolution if you like.    The Channel Guide mimics the iTunes Musci Store in a number of ways, but in my opinion offers a lot more interesting grass-roots video blogs.