Introduction

What is Miro?

Miro is a Free Software video player and podcast client: it can play almost any video file and offers easy access to over 6,000 free Internet TV shows and video podcasts. You can download from YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Blip, and more. You can even save a search term as a feed and automatically get new videos as they are posted.

Miro has a simple, gorgeous interface designed for fullscreen HD video. Since Miro downloads most videos, you can take your shows with you—even on an airplane. Quite simply, Miro is a better way to watch all the video you care about.

Best of all, Miro is 100% free and open source, developed by Participatory Culture Foundation (a non-profit organization) and contributors around the world.

What can Miro be used for?

Miro is a media player. Miro plays video and audio media files in a variety of different formats. This includes Ogg Theora and Vorbis—two formats that are distributed freely and aren’t patent encumbered.

Miro plays HD. Many publishers have high definition versions of their podcasts available on the Internet. Miro plays the episodes in higher quality than what is available on tv.

Miro is a podcast client. Miro allows you to subscribe to podcasts on the Internet. Miro can download media items in the podcasts using HTTP as well as BitTorrent. Miro will tell you when the podcasts you’re subscribed to have new items available..

There’s a ton of high quality material available legally. National Geographic, BBC, NPR, PBS, Revision3, BoingBoing TV, Democracy Now, movie trailers, education, news, space, sports, nature, TED Talks, Discovery Channel, Onion News Network, Nova, NASA, tutorials, electronics, do-it-yourself, conference sessions, yoga, health, ... Use the Miro Guide to find shows you’d be interested in watching.

Who is Participatory Culture Foundation?

Participatory Culture Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA, USA. We were founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

We have several projects we work on:

1. Miro - Our free and open-source desktop video player, built on open standards and designed to encourage decentralization of video hosting.
2. Miro Community - An open-source video presentation service that organizations and communities use to quickly create a beautiful video website.
3. Open Video Alliance - PCF is a founder of the Open Video Alliance, a coalition of organizations, companies, and individuals that are working to create open tools, workflows, licensing systems for online video.
4. Miro Video Converter - An open source video converter for Windows and OSX that makes it really really easy to convert videos targeting a variety of popular devices in a variety of popular formats including Ogg Theora and WebM.
5. Universal Subtitles - A project to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open. We’re building tools and infrastructure to make creating and distributing subtitles easy to do for everyone for all video on the Internet.
6. And other projects, too!

Participatory Culture Foundation is a non-profit and we work on Miro and other projects and make them available to everyone for free. We work with other organizations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and others to make the web and video on the web open and usable by everyone.

If you value the work that we do or wish we could do more of it, please consider donating your time and money. For more on this, see Contributing.

Who works on Miro?

The bulk of the implementation/programming is done by staff members of Participatory Culture Foundation.

Translations are contributed by volunteers using the Launchpad translations interface.

Testing and QA is done by Janet and people like you who volunteer your time and equipment to help make Miro bug-free.

If you’re interested in being a part of our team, see Contributing.