Give Democracy Your Write-In Vote

On this day, Americans around the country will take part in Democracy by casting their votes for candidates and platforms. What most Americans don’t know is that another kind of Democracy exists, a kind you write code for, a kind you contribute documentation to, a kind you use to discover great video content that is delivered through the Internet. You may be sick of phone calls and mailings asking for support, but I can assure you that you’ll support this platform (provided you’re running Windows, Linux or OS X).

Give Democracy Your Write-In Vote

Democracy is an open source “internet video content acquisition, distribution channel, and viewing experience,” or from their website, an “Internet TV Platform.” The software is nice looking (their great design extends to the website as well) and offers basic but useful features, but most of the content I’ve downloaded has been disappointing. I’ve been using Democracy for a few weeks, adding and removing a lot of shows from the Channel Guide. Click “Read More” for my full take on what works and what doesn’t.

Democracy is beta software and is under active development, meaning it suffers from the occasional crash. How many times does your television crash? Democracy player on Windows doesn’t support the Windows Media Center remote, which means it’s not really a “TV” to me (yet). For most TV viewers, Democracy will probably not win them over. If you only want the occasional piece of video content (and don’t want to pay for it) however, Democracy serves that purpose.

Use the Guide to find new content

What Democracy does right

The first thing you’ll notice is that the player is very slick. I have found it to run at an acceptable speed on my aging PC. The screenshots for the Mac version show that the player software looks great. The channel guide feels sluggish however. Democracy is open source software meaning anyone can contribute code, documentation, or bug reports towards improving the product.

The Democracy website helps aspiring content producers get their content published and listed in the Democracy Channel Guide. Good positioning in the Channel Guide would really help a fledgling show get noticed.

Democracy provides download management features. First it (default) will set newly downloaded content to “UNWATCHED” and “Expires in 5 days.” When you watch the content, the unwatched tag disappears. After 5 days, the file is deleted. This helps users with limited storage get new content without worrying about removing old content they’ve already watched. In the case where you wish to prevent the download from being deleted, simply hit “SAVE.” As far as I can tell, iTunes does not offer a “expire” feature. Through Preferences, you can instruct Democracy to throttle upload speed you’re your computer is in use (since it uses BitTorrent under the covers), or not download if your hard drive does not contain a specified amount of free space. As you’d expect, Democracy also manages partial downloads, and can start on boot-up to resume downloads that didn’t finish.

Democracy cycles through videos in your collection by default. This would be nice if I could navigate videos from my couch with a remote however the ability to cycle forward and backward is not accessible from the MCE remote (but does work with the right arrow key on a keyboard). This works well for short pieces of content, like daily news updates. If you get a few days behind and want to catch up, the software will move through each of the videos like tracks on a CD.

If you have a couple of computers, you can setup Democracy in a couple of different ways. First you could set the download location to a remote drive through the Preferences menu. This would be nice with a network attached storage (NAS) device connected to a router or switch (since the network device would be running 24/7 anyway). If you had a server machine, you could setup your downloads with an installation of Democracy on your server, then skip the downloads feature with a second installation on a client machine and just use Democracy as a player. Some users may be familiar with setting up a MythTV Linux server in this fashion (although MythTV certainly provides many more features). For example, you might have a PC on your LAN running and downloading new Democracy content, then an Apple notebook and Windows PC that connect to your Windows PC Democracy server on occasion.

As slick as the Democracy player is visually, there is room for improvement in usability and speed. I consider moving between the Channel Guide and a specific channel a usability problem and quite slow. I can’t jump back into the Channel Guide from the page I was just on. This is a problem because (1) I’m forced to try and navigate back manually to where I left the Channel Guide (instead of just hitting back) and (2) the Channel Guide load time is slow (on my 3MB download connection) which makes me want to avoid using it. Here are additional UI grievances:

• The top green “help” horizontal bar at the top of the channel guide comes back even though I click “Hide this message”
• The progress icon (animated .gif) spinning ball that is displayed when a channel is loading is too small and inconspicuous in the upper right corner of the application
• The navigation (back/forward/home) buttons in the top left (that look like iTunes buttons) are too small
• Navigating backwards in the channel guide should be very fast, but is instead slow since it reloads the entire channel guide with each navigation
• “Preferences” and “Options” launch the same configuration menu. These names should be consolidated.

The functionality of the media navigation buttons (backward, stop, play, forward) could be overloaded to be the navigation buttons for the Channel Guide and could help scroll through videos when navigating a subscription.

Democracy manages video downloads

If the Channel Guide loaded in a separate vertical pane (say the primary content area was divided in two with a vertical separator bar) then I could drill-down into my channel information, remove subscriptions and other tasks related to my subscriptions) while the Channel Guide content loaded (because it loads rather slow). If the Channel Guide speed is improved, users will be able to discover new content more easily. As users continue to vote for content, viewing by popularity will improve. Perhaps Democracy will implement some recommendation features further along in the development cycle.

I do like that they’ve implemented a Tag Cloud when browsing the Channel Guide by tag.

Tech shows I’ve discovered through Democracy

• I find the English (U.K.) hosts of Tech Tips annoying (although I’ve only watched a couple episodes), where I enjoy the voice of the English-sounding host of ScreenCastsOnline (who has a better “radio voice”) though the content is dumbed down.

• Hak.5 is “Wayne’s World meets Linux nerd/coder/IT guy”. The guys are cool but should keep their “acting” to a minimum. The show seems to be quite popular however and they’ve managed to interview some well-known guests (like the “Software Jedi” in a recent episode). I’d seen this show before, but since there is a month between episodes, I never remembered to download it. With subscriptions, I set it up once and new episodes just appear.

• GeekBrief.TV is a short tech show discussing gadgets, useful software, a kind of “video” Engadget or Gizmodo. The outtakes are usually funny as well.

• Diggnation (which was not new to me) does not download new versions of the show. It appears new versions (2006 content) are not compatible with Democracy as of this writing. I’m also not sure if all Revision3 content is available through Democracy. It seems that content producers need to produce a version of their content that is compatible with Democracy.

Music videos and short news programs work well on this platform.

Keyboard navigation/remote control support

The “right” and “left” arrow keys navigate to the next and previous video when a video is playing. I found this confusing as I expected the keys to navigate through the “preview” mode of the downloaded content in a collection. For example, if I make a selection on a video where there is a list of 10 videos, if I click the down arrow, or right arrow, I would expect to advance to the next video so I could move to a specific one to play without using the mouse. Hopefully keyboard and device (remote control, iPod remote, etc.) navigation is enhanced in upcoming releases of Democracy.

I have the Windows Media Center OEM remote that is available for purchase separate from Windows Media Center and is supported on other open source software like MediaPortal. Democracy has no integration with my Media Center remote as of this writing. If MediaPortal can support this remote, I’m sure it is a matter of time before the MCE and other remote control devices are supported. It would be great if Democracy published a list of supported hardware. Hardware integration will improve the “TV” experience, where users are accustomed to remotes, not mice and keyboards.

Quick Tip/hack

If you download Quicktime (or other format) videos outside of Democracy and want to watch them in Fullscreen mode (without paying for QuickTime Pro), you may be able to do that by using Democracy as your player. Drag the video into “My Collection” and refresh the video list in this collection. The only way I’ve done this directly is by restarting Democracy (close and reopen), however if I drop a video in the directory (My Documents/My Videos for the current logged-in user on my machine) there appears to be some “polling” every few minutes, since I noticed that my video downloaded outside of Democracy suddenly appeared in My Collection. When you bring up Democracy again, you’ll see your video you downloaded directly in My Collection and can play it in Fullscreen mode (Alt+Enter in Windows). By dropping your video in the Democracy download location, you get “SHOW FILE” and “Delete” links for your videos (even though you downloaded them outside of Democracy).

Donate to the Democracy project or follow the Democracy blog (and stay up to date on new versions and features). Tired of reading? Democracy has a walkthrough with tons of screenshots. Stay tuned to this up-and-comer software to see how it fairs against competitors like Google/YouTube.