We are excited to release Baby Democracy Player (version 0.8.4) today, for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Baby Democracy is our first child, the first stage in a growing Democracy Player to come! We’ll let you know when Democracy Player becomes a toddler, a schoolkid, etc. (We’ll have pictures soon!) Baby Democracy is more stable and faster too, it’s a strong and healthy baby! Download it here.

Democracy Player is now much, much more stable– we’ve fixed every crash and freeze that we know about. The application is also much faster, especially with lots of videos. This version is still a beta, but we’re getting close to shedding our infant coats and becoming a 1.0 app. Our development team have been waiting anxiously to release 0.8.4 Democracy Player because there is two months of intense development that we have to show. The developers would also like me to note that we finished exactly 420 ‘tickets’ (bug reports, features, etc) for this release.

There are also a couple new features, most notably: you can now use Democracy Player as a desktop video player– you can drag and drop or open videos in Democracy from your desktop. They will start playing and will be imported into your library. This is an important step towards making Democracy a good homebase for all the videos on your computer. (On a mac, this is especially nice because you can watch videos fullscreen with nice fullscreen controls, without buying Quicktime Pro.)

Finally, we are already in week 2 of our 4 week development cycle for version 0.9. Now that we’ve stabilized the backend, there are lots of features to look forward to– folders, playlists, drag and drop within the app, non-english versions of the app (click here to help translate), Democracy as a generic torrent application, and for all you publishers: one-click subscribe and install / subscribe. Plus a bunch of nice UI tweaks and further speed improvements.

We’ll be releasing development versions of 0.9 each Friday and we could really, really use your help testing, if you like living on the edge. Just join the testers list we’ll email you when we post a new version and you can check out the new features as they arrive.

See how cute our baby is at getmiro.com.

We asked for your help a month ago testing a beta of Democracy Player 0.8.3. That beta was the start of some big structural changes behind the scenes that are making Democracy much faster and more bug free. However, we decided that rather than release 0.8.3 we would finish the structural changes and skip right to 0.8.4. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re very close to releasing 0.8.4 and the testing versions that we have now are already much more reliable and faster. If you’d like to help test (especially on Windows), we would love the help. Here’s the testing versions: Democracy Player 0.8.3 RC3 and here’s info on how to test.

Democracy Player is completely translatable! We have joined with Launchpad and now have a simple webpage to guide you through translating Democracy Player (or if you’re pro, you can still download it). That means, that as long as you know English and another language, you can start translating.

Start translating here.

We need your help because we believe your language is just as important, so help us get Democracy Player into your language now! Or recruit your friend who speaks with that awesome accent!

We got a couple nice mentions in a New York Times article today, after the reporter saw Tiffiniy’s excellent presentation about Democracy Player and internet TV. Here’s the article.