TV and Movies not enough? Get more video with Miro.

The TV shows aren’t going to be back until later this spring, so what are we supposed to do during this WGA strike-created television drought? Miro is an app that is designed to “turn your computer into an Internet TV.” Now it might not give you access to your favorite shows from FOX, ABC, and NBC, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a great selection of video to watch, much of it in HD. The app can manage your video files, but its main purpose is to gather video from the many sources it hooks you up to.

The first thing you notice when you open the app is the “Miro Guide.”

This is a lot like iTunes’ front page. You see featured and popular content, as well as a list of categories to browse a bit deeper. At the moment there are 3726 channels to choose from, but you can also add any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Miro also plays the video files on your hard drive, whether they’re in Quicktime, Windows Media, MPEG, H.264, DivX, or AVI format.

If that’s not enough content for you, Miro has built-in YouTube searching support. It also enables you to download the videos you find — something you can’t do from YouTube’s website.

On top of it all, Miro supports BitTorrent. Many people use this in combination with BitTorrent RSS feeds of network TV shows to automatically download every episode of their favorite shows the night after they air. Editors Note: We do not endorse the use BitTorrent (or anything else) to download copyrighted material as it is illegal. This same automatic downloading works with any source. To be safe, you can set how much space Miro is allowed to use, and it will stop downloading new videos when it reaches that point. If you want, you can also set a time period until videos expire and are automatically deleted.

Miro has some really great features, even if it isn’t the most well-designed app out there. Many of the buttons aren’t the standard interface elements we’re used to in Mac OS X, a common side-effect of apps that are offered in PC and Linux versions. All in all, though, the user experience doesn’t suffer too much; it may not be as sleek as the “true” Mac applications out there, but it’s still very usable.

The company behind it also represents a good cause. “Miro is a free, open-source software project led by a non-profit organization. It’s a platform that benefits everyone by keeping online video open. Our organization isn’t controlled by venture capitalists or stockholders, which means we always put our users first.”

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Miro is absolutely free.

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