Democracy: Internet TV

The developers tout Democracy as “The Only Video Player You Need”. I decided to run it through its paces. The version I tested was 0.9.5 RC2. Keep in mind that it may be a little unstable, as beta versions tend to be, but I’m sure everyone reading this will settle for nothing less than the bleeding edge of software development.

The Interface
Despite Democracy being a multi-platform app, the interface is very polished. It is immediately clear that a lot of work has gone into it to make it look suitable for the Mac. The layout of the app is similar to that of iTunes, probably a good thing since I can’t think of any other suitable way to layout an app of this kind. Then again I’ve never written a line of code in my life. The source list in the left contains the Channel Guide, Video Search, My Collection, New Videos and Downloading. The first two of these areas are the most interesting and least self-explanatory so I will focus on those.

The Channel Guide is Democracy’s built in content source. There are many shows listed in this online TV guide, which are split up into categories. A search function is also available if you are looking for a specific show. The first place to look is in the “browse channels by popularity”, this is generally a good way to get started, especially if you are new to online video content.

The Video Search capability allows you to search, view and save videos from many of the gigantic online video repositories, to name a few: YouTube, Google Video, blip.tv, the list goes on. Democracy allows you to save your searches as channels which are dynamically updated with fresh content as soon as it becomes available.

Getting Video into Democracy
Democracy is very strong in this department, supporting a great variety of options for importing video. When you first launch Democracy you have the option to let it search your hard drive for video content that already exists and then have it automatically added to your collection. Video podcasts, obviously are a must for an app like Democracy and they have been implemented in a very pleasing fashion. Democracy can download video through direct video podcast feeds or even BitTorrent feeds. This is a great way to keep up to date with your favourite TV shows if you can find the appropriate torrent RSS feed, currently I use one for the show Heroes and it is going strong.

Democracy is smart enough to allow you to specify downloading rules for each feed. This means you could set it up so you always have the latest episode of “the show with zefrank” but then only download the music videos you really want from “Telemusicvision”.

Watching Videos
Since Democracy is powered by VLC and Quicktime, there should be almost no cases in which you come across videos that are unwatchable. All of the channels listed in my Democracy player send out videos encoded in m4v, mov, or mp4. Since Democracy keeps all the downloaded videos nicely organised in your Movies folder inside your home directory, they are all easily viewable through Front Row if you would prefer to watch from across the room. It will be interesting to see if they manage to force their way onto the AppleTV somehow, although I can’t think of a way yet, short of importing video into iTunes.

The Verdict
Democracy is a very full featured app that has the potential to take off in a big way. However, a few things need to happen first:

• It needs to get faster and more responsive, especially once the video collection starts to grow and while videos are downloading.
• Let us do other things while watching videos, maybe an option to open in an external window.
• Get some better icons for the source list, the current ones look a bit… yeah, I’m sure you get it.
• Don’t refresh the Channel Guide each time I leave it and come back to it.

Democracy is a Universal Binary and is free and open source. If you’ve used it in the past but haven’t checked out the latest version in a while, a lot of progress has been made. Since I downloaded Democracy, I haven’t watched one video in iTunes.

Drop us a note in the comments letting us know what you love in the world of online video. Got a video podcast? Hook me up, I’m always looking for the latest and greatest. You can grab Democracy here.

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