DTV released as Democracy (Linux Preview)

The long awaited, open-source Democracy platform is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation allowing you to subscribe to video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), watch fullscreen and share with friends.

So I checked out Democracy and was impressed at the layout and that I was actually able to download content right away from the predefined feeds. I started watching a recent rocketboom without a hitch. That isn’t to say that there are no bugs. Full screen works, but with multiple monitors it scretches across both screen thus not supporting xinerama. The channel menu does not work for me and when I went to the channel guide and clicked on “more…” for a channel it bombs out. I later found out that I needed to make sure you add the mozilla prefs as specified on the DemoTV wiki. There are alot of options for IPTV and I’m sure it will only grow. Democracy allows one to view all of these options easily and subscribing to feeds is straight forward and the interface seems intuative. It looks very promising and I look forward to a stable build soon. See screenshots inside….

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podcasting

Everyone seems to be getting into podcasting more and more. I just watched a video about how to create a podcast over at the systm.org website. They had alot of information in there latest video 0004 called podcasting. I really liked the idea of a backup recorder like the marantz PMD670 Professional Solid State Portable Recorder. It has alot of nice features and would be a great portable recording device. They also interviewed Leo Laporte who hosts the TWiT podcast. He has a nice setup with a Mackie mixer. I saw one one Musician’s Friend that looked affordable called the Mackie Onyx 1220 12-Channel Mixer. This mixer is really nice and even allows you to buy the *cough* $400 dollar fireware add-on card to allow a direct connection to your computer and record each track seperately into a audio program. The best part of the podcast was their recommendation of the program called Audacity. I’ve used this program before and it is a really nice audio editing program. I was able to split up a long mp3 file using labels into much smaller managable “chapters” to then put on CDs to listen in the car.

So I’m trying to figure out what I would like to podcast. If you got any ideas send them over to me or leave me a comment. Also if you would like to donate to help get me one of those portable recorders click on the donate link on the bottom right. Thanks!