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Linux Version of Democracy Player Released

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Apr 27, 2006 07:22 PM
from the tune-in-turn-up dept.
Television Software Media Linux
clahey writes "The Participatory Culture Foundation just released Democracy Player 0.8.2 for Linux, the first beta version for Linux. It's a free software internet TV client with built in support for both RSS video podcasts and downloading using BitTorrent. It can even scrape web pages for videos. It's an excellent way to find great internet video. For example, once you've installed Democracy, make sure to check out The Postal Service - Such Great Heights on the Telemusicvision channel."
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Linux Version of Democracy Player Released 50 Comments More /

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  • Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

    How appropriate for an internet TV appliance article.
  • Never let open-source programmers decide the name of their applications!
  • Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"

    What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.

    Perhaps if the video were mentioned in the article it would be more accepta--OH WAIT! What article? All we have is a link to the home page of this project. Okay, it's open source, and it's probably cool. Fine. Submit an article, or at least a

    • Re:Nice Summary! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Wannabe Code Monkey (638617) on Thursday April 27 2006, @08:43PM (#15217897)

      Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"

      What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.

      Hey now, calm down now buddy. I'll see if I can help shed some light on the problem. Here's a quote from the summary: It can even scrape web pages for videos. It's an excellent way to find great internet video. For example... It then goes on to talk about the Postal Service video you mentioned. They were using this specific video as an example of how it can scrape web pages for videos, one of the features of this video player. A specific example given to display the features of a product seems very apropos to me.

      Perhaps if the video were mentioned in the article it would be more accepta--OH WAIT! What article? All we have is a link to the home page of this project. Okay, it's open source, and it's probably cool. Fine. Submit an article

      Since when are articles the only thing you can link to in a slashdot submission? It's an open source video player with (apparently) tons of cool features with its first released linux version. It sounds interesting and slashdot worthy. And, how else could you get any more information about an open source program other than linking to it's web site? Probably better than a press release or article.

    • Why should I take special care to "check out the Postal Service?"

      Because it's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.

      What exactly does this bring to the table? People who had or have an interest in the band probably saw the video in 2003 when it was released. It has NOTHING to do with the software being advertised.

      It's an example of high quality content you can get through this kind of system.
      • It took me quite a while to figure out reading the comments here that "the postal service" was apparently the name of a music band or something along those lines.

        I too didn't really see the point of going to a postal service's site to get great videos ("and this is Bob sorting parcels, say hi Bob").

        Of course most music videos aren't that much more exciting either...

  • Unfortunately, it's still buggy as hell... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ritz_Just_Ritz (883997) on Thursday April 27 2006, @07:27PM (#15217450)
    I've been using the democracy player under OSX and Windows for the last several versions. It also frequently crashes, often taking out its config files in the process. The bitorrent bits wreak havoc on your network connection (on OSX and WinXP). The Linux version JUST became available, but given the problems with the more "mature" platforms, I'm reluctant to inflict it on my Linux laptop...

    • Re:Unfortunately, it's still buggy as hell... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CarpetShark (865376) on Thursday April 27 2006, @08:02PM (#15217697)
      The last windows version was pretty bad. However, the linux version at least uses different user interface technology, and the last release was largely focused on stability. I just used it for a few hours on Linux, and for a first version, it's pretty good. Not without its faults, but download it, try it, file bug reports, and keep on using it 'til they're fixed; I'm sure you won't be disappointed :)
    • At least on OS X they make the ultimate open source fault: Thinking end users are all geeks.

      They break backward compatibility at least from 0.81 to 0.82 , I was really really bugged to see my gigabyte level movie archive (big deal, 512kbit here) gone havoc after updating to 0.82.

      Solution was to delete ~/Application Support/Democracy they say. Yea, see I know what ~ means ;)

      This always happens in open source applications. I really don't want to generalize but it is the deal. Sorry.

      If there is ONE project to
    • not in my experience. .82 has been pretty solid for me. I'm using it on a Powermac G5 running 10.4.6 and a crapload of ram/vram.

  • You Blasted Democrats! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2006, @07:34PM (#15217497)
    F* off you democrats! We don't need your Democracy propaganda on Slashdot.
  • This player is really neat! But there are other players out there.

    For example, once you've read this comment, make sure you check out Nickelback's new smash hit, "All The Right Reasons" on www.supermusicchannel.com today! And once you've done that, make sure you go to www.pepsico.com for your chance to enter a FREE sweepstakes to win more Pepsi products!

    • Re:slashvertising? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Putting Nickelback in an advertisement is as big a mistake as naming a chocolate product with "Poopykins" in it... or, like, naming a videogame console something that sounds like urine. Can you imagine something so silly?
    • I don't know if I'd call this advertising. Democracy Player *seems* to be a non-commercial project. The code is open, and the development model is relatively open too. I'm not quite convinced of their openness and intentions though, since their channel guide seems to be closed. If it remains closed, it's a way for them to lock-in customers, AND producers, by building up a large database of media that no one else can put into their own products. More importantly, the channel guide URL can't be changed i

    • RTFA (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cahiha (873942)
      I suggest you read the background at participatoryculture.org [participatoryculture.org]. Since you can't be bothered to follow the links, here are the relevant bits:

      Our mission is to build an open and democratic television platform.

      Television is the defining medium of our culture. There's now an opportunity to create a television culture that is fluid, diverse, exciting, and beautiful. Built by people working together.

      The platform is open-source and built on open-standards. This matters because it keeps video flowin

        • Video can be done well: it can challenge, stimulate, and communicate. Seeing the bloodshed in a war with your own eyes gives you a completely different perspective than reading dry, sterile words about it. The problem with video is not the medium, it's that in the past, it has only been available to people with deep pockets and matching views.

          It's ironic to have you talk about "shallow and conformist" acts, because the dull reading list you give is about the shallowest and most conformist list imaginable.
  • Democracy = TV = advertising = buying things and throwing them in landfills while your society overpopulates, pollutes, and destroys all finer things for convenience. Brilliant name!
    • Democracy = TV = advertising = buying things and throwing them in landfills while your society overpopulates, pollutes, and destroys all finer things for convenience. Brilliant name!

      Infoterror = woke up on wrong side of bed = likes making two sides of an equation not equal = Insightful mod. Brilliant Post!

  • there are separate downloads for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora? Well, ok, there are actually two different downloads for Fedora.

    And if one is running Mandriva? Suse? ....
    • It crashes on Ubuntu right after any movie (I tried 3 different ones) finishes to play... and DP re-downloads crashed movies after I fire it up again. I guess you don't have to make a decent product to make it to /.
    • And if one is running Mandriva? Suse? .... .. then you learn about how to install the dependent software and build packages for your distro. If you are into Participating in your Culture, you will redistribute the package, or maybe even join the project and make a new package for each stable release. Sorry they don't have silver platters for everyone, I think it is pretty smooth that they have been able to develop this 'platform' for Linux, Windows and Mac at the same time.

      I also think that they are being

  • Dependancy issues on Dapper (Score:3, Informative)

    by eqisow (877574) on Thursday April 27 2006, @08:15PM (#15217761) Homepage
    The Ubuntu .deb has dependancy issues on Ubuntu Dapper Drake. dpkg complains of libboost-python1.33.0 being missing because Dapper use libboost-python1.33.1.
  • No builds of DemocracyPlayer for Mandriva. Can't install Fedora rpm on Mandriva 2005 because of unresolvable deps wrt libstdc++...


    Tried to compile from source (stable, not svn), but couldn't make heads-or-tails of the README (half-done).

    Anybody have any luck with non-Debian/Fedora Distros?
  • It seems as though proposed legislation would mandate some pretty nasty DRM be incorporated into broadcast streams. If that be the case, I suppose Democracy and the very idea of Participatory Culture will be finished in the USA.

    I was wondering how long it would be before our representatives finally outlawed Democracy. Apparently, the day is at hand.

    • Re:more like Democrack Player (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cahiha (873942) on Thursday April 27 2006, @10:40PM (#15218429)
      Because YouTube and Google are commercial sites that host the content with commercial motives in mind and with commercial constraints on their operations. They are free right now because those companies want to grab a big chunk of market share and prevent the kind of democratic, distributed infrastructure from appearing that Democracy player is intended to give you.

      Democracy player is an attempt at letting anybody host and distribute video without having YouTube or Google-like bandwidth at their disposal.

      I'm sorry if you don't get why this might be important.

      Maybe it will help if you think a little about IM services. The reason why we have AOL and MSN and all those other centralized commercial services that play poorly with FOSS, that are easy to listen in on, and that impose all sorts of restrictions is not technical, it's because those services managed to grab market share quickly, before a distributed IM infrastructure could take hold. If it hadn't been for that historical accident, IM would probably be more like E-mail today, with tens of thousands of interoperable hosts and open protocols.

      People would like Internet video streaming to be more like E-mail services than like IM services: distributed and open.
    • Because the closed-source flash components do not yet seem to have an available package for my AMD64-based Debian machine.Fooey

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