Miro 2.0 - Review and Comments

Okay so Miro 2.0 is here! There has been a LOT of work that has been put in to get to this point. I had used various beta versions, but it had been a little while since I had used the 2.0 version. In summary of everything that will follow I am VERY impressed with what has been done in this latest release and I encourage you to try it out: http://www.getmiro.com/

So now into the good and the bad. I'm going to get the bad out of the way first. So the first thing is that I have a LOT of different channels, so Miro in the past has taken ~8-10 minutes to launch. So that has always been a problem in my mind. But since I have a lot of channels I have never really faulted the developers for this since Miro will launch pretty quickly if you don't have ~160+ channels. Unfortunately when I updated Miro to a long time to update the database from the older version of Miro to the latest one. I didn't use a stop watch or anything, but it was 20+ minutes that it took. But everything worked properly migrating from the older version of Miro to 2.0. So that's the important thing. And the other important thing is that the ~8-10 minute launch time of Miro 1.X has now been cut to ~2 minutes. Which is a big difference in my mind. And I don't think that most people will have as many channels as I do so I think most people will see it launching in an order of seconds.

The other problem I've always had with Miro is how much memory it uses. With all the channels I have I have seen it occasionally using ~1GB+. This essentially rendered my 1GB memory laptop pretty useless when I would use Miro + Firefox at the same time. Now I haven't seen Miro consume much more than 600MB. A vast improvement in my mind, and it is noticeable to me since I can now use gnome + Firefox + Miro without having my system slow to a crawl. Before I had to use the enlightenment window manager to have any chance of using Miro and Firefox together. But not any more!

And the last semi negative thing is that Miro after the update was using the xine for the video renderer. I assume that this was because Miro was set to use this from the 1.X versions. Everything worked fine using xine except for when any window/box overlapped the video playback then there would be a black box on the screen unless you toggled the fullscreen. Switching to gstreamer made all these problems go away.

The first thing that you will notice about Miro 2.0 is that it looks much better when viewing the channels, there are different views for looking at the videos/channels. Very nice. Video playback has a different look and everything that has changed fixes little problems that existed in the past, it isn't just a change of look at feel for the sake of making it look prettier, though I guess this might not be a horrible thing. I.e. the fullscreen mode now looks much better and by simply moving the mouse the control bar comes back into view, allowing you to delete or save a video among other things. Before you would need to leave fullscreen and then find the button. Now it's much more efficient.

Another really nice thing is that Miro now has keyboard shortcuts that work in fullscreen and non fullscreen! And the keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and what you would expect them to be! E.g.:
* pause/play - spacebar
* skip forward - arrow right
* skib backward - arrow left

There are more useful shortcuts for changing fullscreen, changing volume, etc. But the problem I see in terms of user friendliness is that the shortcuts that I mentioned above are not displayed in the menue bar. Although all the other keyboard shortcuts are listed... Maybe the devs assume that people will know the shortcuts since they are so intuitive (which they are), but for the new user this might not be completely intuitive. One thing that I find a little odd in the playback window is that the buttons that advance from one video to the next actually look like fast forward buttons... a small thing, but it seems like they should just have the universal "next track" button instead. It only takes clicking it once to know what it will do, but it just seems like it would make sense to have the button match the action better.

Miro also now allows you to un-dock the playback window from the main Miro window so that you can change settings, look at different channels/videos. This is a very cool idea, and I have used it a few times already, and I can imagine that this would be very useful if playing video on one monitor or projector and you are wanting to queue up some content to play right after the current video or if you want to add something to a playlist.

Even though I rambled on here for a while, there are MANY more things that have improved or been added to Miro 2.0 that are great, so give it a try for yourself and see all the great things that have been done. Once again VERY impressive and great job to everyone who worked on this release!