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Mozilla The Internet Software The Almighty Buck Linux

Democracy Player Receives $100K Grant From Mozilla 71

Posted by Zonk from the friendly-dinosaur-in-our-midst dept.
puntloos writes "The Open Source Internet TV Platform 'Democracy' has just received a $100,000 Grant from the Mozilla Foundation. Democracy is a combination of ways to view and download media to your desktop in an intuitive way, built on top of the ever-popular VLC video player. Seth's blog has details: 'The Mozilla Board agreed to support them for the following reasons: 1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web. 2. They're building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI -- and it's based on Mozilla technology. 3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for...they don't have any venture backing, they're running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.'"
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Democracy Player Receives $100K Grant From Mozilla More

Democracy Player Receives $100K Grant From Mozilla

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  • well damn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:24PM (#19342303)
    That tops my donation of $5.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by asninn ( 1071320 )
      Who knows. Compared to the income of the for-profit Mozilla organisation they've got now, it's really just a drop in the barrel.
  • I've been using Democracy Player since its release, and it's only gotten better.

    This should give things a boost :)

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Cap'nPedro ( 987782 )
      Nope. Everyone knows that when you donate money to open source projects like this, the developers spend the money on beer and porn.

      $100K is gonna fund a hell of a lot of time wasting.
    • I like it, but it can be a lot better. I simply can't understand why it feels so bloated.

  • Great package needs more content (Score:3, Interesting)

    by monopole ( 44023 ) on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:26PM (#19342337)
    A really great package, but it needs more channels and better search capabilities. And a transcode module for transferring content to iPods, PSPs and Palms.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm sure posting feature requests on Slashdot is very helpful & effective.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bshensky ( 110723 )
      uh, yeah, and how about some Democracy _daemons_ and standalone _front_ends_ for MythTV and XBMC? That'd be killer!

      Oh wait - I once tried to start a thread on the Democracy boards about doing just this and was summarily shot down because the powers in charge feared its Bittorrent foundations would set up Democracy as an RIAA/MPAA DMCA takedown target.

      It sure seems really silly that I have to run Democracy in a VNC server session on my MythTV box, media folder shared among Democracy and the Myth frontend, s

  • Sounds great! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jshriverWVU ( 810740 ) on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:27PM (#19342347)
    I'm anxious to see how this develops. My only concern with the "coming Internet-TV age" is the whole bandwidth throttling. What's to start some start-up from getting TV feeds like any cable company does and creating an internet-TV station.

    That with devices like Myth Boxes, and the media center boxes. I can imagine people giving up TV completely and just keeping their broadband connection. I know I would.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by misleb ( 129952 )

      That with devices like Myth Boxes, and the media center boxes. I can imagine people giving up TV completely and just keeping their broadband connection. I know I would.


      Already there. No cable. No antenna. Just a Myth box running torrentflux (web front end for Bittorrent).

      -matthew

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Daengbo ( 523424 )
        same setup for me. I'm living in S. Korea now, so there's very little on cable that I want to watch. We have a file server with TorrentFlux and MythTV on it. A great system, and surprisingly easy to set up this time. On Ubuntu 7.04, just install the special packages for frontend and backend and everything else is automatic. NVidia TVout completes the picture. Snazzy. I'm not going to use Democracy Plaer because I already have the set up, but I looked it over and sent a link to the webite to a couple of fri

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by misleb ( 129952 )
          I didn't really "get" Democracy player. I browsed some of the channels and stuff and it seemed like mostly worthless content. I guess it is meant more for managing your own content? i dunno. i wouldn't know where to get it.

          -matthew

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Daengbo ( 523424 )
            I just played around with it, but it seems to me that adding thepiratebay RSS feeds in would be a good way to get good content. It does BT downloads and the main page in the player has a bunch of popular feeds on it. Torrent Portal also has feeds that work with it. Again, I'm not using it because I've set up a server specifically for this, but if I only had one comp in the house, I'd consider using it, for sure.

  • First things first (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When will they give 100K to some developers to fix the long-standing memory leaks?
  • should be enough to ensure Democracy players success.
    • slightly off topic but...

      I have to say that, having not heard of Democracy Player until now, when I read the headline, I thought it was about some player from outside the US being rebranded by someone inside the US over some percieved insult, along the lines of the whole "Freedom Fries" episode. Then I saw the parent subject and that almost confirmed my suspicions....

      What kind of name is Democracy Player? I mean really? OSS get cops a lot of flak for names like the GIMP but I'd much prefer to have the GIM

  • I've also been using Democracy for quite a while now, and it is a really useful piece of software. The guys deserve the grant, Congratulations!

  • My suggestions for Democracy Player: (Score:4, Informative)

    by Stormx2 ( 1003260 ) on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:35PM (#19342487)
    I've been using this player for a long while now. However, it could do with some improvement:

    a) It is awfully slow, especially on startup. I'm not on a slow system, and other apps will be up within a matter of seconds.
    b) It isn't programmable from the command line ( --help will launch the player..)
    c) No lirc support
    d) No support for moving files once they've downloaded.

    This all relates to my current version, which I can't check at the moment. If any of this has been improved, please excuse this post (:

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vunzzz ( 521044 )
      You might have a look at ToxTox [toxtox.tv]. This is a Media Browser for your TV (full screen). You can fully control it with a remote and Lirc. Like Democracy it's completly open and free and multi platform. Although the development started only recently it's worth a try. It's just a better experience than using a desktop app for watching your favorite shows. See the ToxTox weblog [toxtox.tv]

    • I used it (Score:2, Interesting)

      by twice1109850 ( 1109855 )
      doesn't prominently give credit where due - vlc
      sits uploading torrents without asking, saves bloat files everywhere, did I mention bloat?
      and RRL [type "boingboing.net"] gave it props so it must suck.

      first twice1109850 comment.. I can see this account going downhill

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ndogg ( 158021 )
      They know people want this feature, so I don't feel bad about posting it here, but a FREAKIN' SYSTRAY ICON!!!!!!!!!

      I hate having to use up an entire spot on my taskbar just for Democracy.

      Oh, and it still crashes on my machine more often than any of my other desktop apps.
      • Just turn off the taskbar. That's what I did and I don't miss it at all.
      • Yeah, that might be related to the fact that they still haven't hit the mystical 1.0 release yet (and unlike a lot of other open source software that is rock solid and amazingly fully featured before 1.0, Democracy needs it).
  • It will definately be interesting to see what they can accomplish with that kind of grant.

  • Here comes the fun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) * on Thursday May 31, 2007 @04:27PM (#19343267) Journal
    Content owners/providers have been inching towards pay-per-view everything for some time now. Anything that gets in their way will get stepped on. My money says Mozilla just assured that Democracy will be among the first to get sued. Doesn't matter what for, as long as it makes them have to burn up more than $100K.
    • I've been thinking about this for the past week, how to get studios and non geeks to switch over to pure internet TV? All it needs is a "channel" to be an RSS-like XML list of links to media files (and links to other channels).

      You could allow a link to a PNG (of a fixed size) for each link so you can nice purty on-screen listings.

      Because it's all open XML you can mashup your own "channels" of your favourite programs

      throw in "radio" support

      Do all the requests over HTTP. And allow users to store their credit-

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sumdumass ( 711423 )
      You know, I hope your not right. But if they do get sued, it could be a rallying cry for more funding.

      I'm not sure I like it when non profits or companies who ask for donations donate to other non profit organizations or companies. It seems like mozilla has too much money now and we don't need to give them any more. I don't think that is the case in actuality but that turns out to be the general gist some will have. I know people who have donated to the red cross and the breast caner place who stopped givin
  • Maybe now they can fix that stupid Python 2.5 dependency that prevents its installation on Feisty? And maybe add some shortcuts to the video player. For God's sake, how hard can it be? Other than that, it's an astonishing product.
    • They have said that the bug will be fixed in 0.9.6, but no-one has a clue when that will be released. I think it might be fixed in the SVN version.
  • I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that democracy is good for society.
  • Do you have to use their own RSS feeds for the system or can I import in some of my Broadcatching rss feeds from a few TVBitTorrAggrate type sites? If this allows adding your own RSS to the builtin torrent system i would use this in a second. I had seen Democracy earlier and bypassed it but if it work in this way a new user you will have.
  • I can't take this overspread and reliance on flash. It chews up CPU like crazy and halts my system, and often I can't hear the sound. I've resorted to the unplug extension on fireox, downloading the movies, and playing them on mplayer. As cumbersome as this is, it doesn't work in all cases. Some are too deeply embedded. Of course there are also the newer movies that require flash 9, which theoretically has a linux firefox plugin, but it crashes firefox every time. Just give me the damn mpeg (or whatever for
    • yeah, the problems people have with other people trying to give you the video w/o actually giving you the video. (ps, does anyone have a tool to get a video wrapped in a swf file?)
    • You sure you've upgraded to the final Flash Player 9 for Linux? Since the final release I haven't had any problems, though before that it constantly crashed. You might also look into the flashblock extension for Firefox. It blocks the flash but lets you click on it to view if you want. Pretty handy, especially when I have to use the laptop with only 256mb that otherwise gets killed by sites with tons of youtube (or similar) embedded videos.
  • One of Democracy's strengths has been their communication and seemingly ability to develop the app on nothing, so this donation should be a massive boost. On the downside I've tried to use it to replace VLC on the Mac Mini under my TV and while it handles downloaded video pretty well it struggles with my existing library (about 150Gb). Then again I haven't found anything that manages really well so maybe I'm just being picky. It's a new technology and I hope that Democracy will do well enough to compete.
  • Stupidly , I was under the impression that Mozilla foundation exists in order to develop Mozilla products.
    Not to give money away to random "worthy" projects.
  • I've written this before and I will write it again ...

    I think that a Mozilla Summer of Code would be a good idea.

    And the Mozilla Foundation should really put their money behind XULRunner. It's one of the oldest solutions that utilizes XML + Scripting on the desktop. But I "fear" that similiar technologies from Adobe (Apollo) and Microsoft (Quicksilver) will take the market by storm.

    Bye egghat
  • Well I hope they spend some of that 100K to make the friggin thing compatible with Python-2.5.
  • Mozilla Foundation must have a bit of money

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