Democracy Player 0.9 Released
Democracy Player 0.9 is a major update. We’ve added big new features while simplifying and improving the existing user flow. We’ve also polished the interface design in a few very nice ways.
Download it now: Democracy Player 0.9
See it in action: ScreenCastsOnline has made a nice video walkthrough of this new version– Watch it Here. Even better, subscribe to ScreenCastsOnline in Democracy Player.
WHAT’S NEW:
Playlists You can now create playlists to organize your favorite videos. I have a playlist called ‘Keepers’ that I’ve been using to keep track of videos that I like to show people as we’re sitting down to watch a movie at my house, kind of like previews, but better.
Folders To organize your channels and your new playlists, you can now create folders.
Flash Video Tons of video online is now in Flash format. The Windows and Linux versions of Democracy Player can now play Flash videos from most flash hosting sites. In addition, Google Video and Youtube have been added to the search choices. (The Mac version can’t play flash in the main window, but we’ve made it easy to launch it in a separate window.)
Drag and Drop Previous versions of Democracy Player didn’t let you select individual videos or drag anything around. But you can’t get videos into playlists or channels into channel folders without drag and drop. So we made drag and drop. This makes getting organized much easier and lets you move or delete big batches of stuff.
Menu Overhaul Menu options in Democracy Player have been a little neglected. They were inconsistent on different platforms and some of the options weren’t even connected to any functionality. We’ve organized, updated, and connected all the menus, which should make for a much better experience. We’ve also added some helpful right-click menu functionality on videos, channels, folders, and playlists.
Multiple Languages This is the first version of Democracy to support non-English languages on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Democracy is at least partially translated in over 30 languages. Check out the current language list and help translate.
Polish There’s a few other UI polishes, that look nice and improve usability. First, we have better, more useful error messages when a download fails for some reason. Second, we show available disk space in the downloads tab. Third, we made the orange, blue, and green circles in the sidebar prettier. We also mellowed out the top bar on individual channels (we got complaints that it was blindingly bright) and we made the divider bars silvery, to avoid a total blue overload that was happening when we introduced the new blue select state. Lastly, we’ve made lots of other small changes throughout the app that will make your experience smoother and more intuitive.
So go try it out. And don’t forget to check the Sheeps Week page tomorrow for more new stuff…
September 11th, 2006 at 10:11 am
… every time a new release comes out, I try to install it, and it fails on a long list of depedencies. This is on Debian. Back when libboost was documented as not installing cleanly from apt, I installed it by hand and still failed to get the thing to go. Yes, apt is great, apt is fantastic, yadda yadda yadda, but I’ve never seen it work and in all of my years no one has been able to demonstrate it working on anything with more than a few well used dependencies. It always gets wedged up somewhere.
So, won’t you pretty please take a cue from the Mozilla foundation and release a universal binary and/or an installer for a universal binary and bundle your dependencies? Document that it needs a certain version of Python (which is another story… wretched backwards compatability) and release a big tarball with a launcher .sh that figures out the current path, adds that to LD_RUN_PATH and whatnot, and fires the thing off?
That’s not to mention the Slackware users, people running Linux emulation in FreeBSD, and so on and so forth. As it is, I’ve got a Debian machine sitting here just so I can *try* to run apps like this, but I’d much rather install it on my main machine. Cripes… I’ve wasted countless hours trying to get this damn thing to run.
-scott
September 11th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Hi Scott,
We don’t control the Debian package directly. If you’re still having problems, please post them here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=democracyplayer
Thanks!
nicholas
September 12th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Scott, which Debian version are you using? I’m maintaining the Debian package in unstable, that should work right out of the box (apt-get install democracyplayer).
There’s currently no package for Sarge, AFAIK (that may be the problem; the unstable package won’t run on Sarge).
Uwe.
September 13th, 2006 at 3:21 am
I had used Democracy Player when it was version 0.8 and thought it showed a lot of promise. 0.9 certainly is living up to that in many ways!
Now, if only it would actually play video for me, it might be extremely satisfying to use! All I get though is a white screen. Every format is the same (tried MPEG, Quicktime, and a Flash Video) and there are no errors. Just a white screen until I hit Stop and then it returns me to the previous screen. I’m quite a regular digital video consumer and none of my other media players share this problem. Any ideas?
September 13th, 2006 at 6:17 am
Dustin, are you on Linux or Windows? What kind of computer and what version of the operating system do you have?
September 13th, 2006 at 6:49 am
Great to see folders in there… Next step: let us rename channels!
September 13th, 2006 at 6:58 am
Tim, soon! So very soon!
September 13th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Nicholas: I’m running Windows XP SP2. The latest version of Quicktime is installed, Flash 9 is installed, and I use Media Player Classic as my primary media player normally. I’d really like to have Democracy working again, so I’d appreciate any help troubleshooting the issue.
September 13th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
Dustin,
If you are in Linux, try restarting the graphical interface. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. For me, I get a blue screen sometimes, and if I restart Gnome it fixes it.
September 14th, 2006 at 7:35 am
How do you change the language? I’m using Ubuntu Dapper and installed the debs over the old 0.8.3. It’s still completely in English. Doesn’t it detect my system’s language which is Finnish? I tried to find something from settings and democracy folder that would let me change it but found nothing… So where can I change the language?
September 17th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Hi
One feature that would totally rock would be just a couple of simple menu items:
* “Play New Videos” - immediately plays the new videos collection in full screen
* Separate menu items for play/pause (as opposed to space bar)
These items would also need keyboard equivalents. The reason this would be awesome would be so that I can program a remote control for my girlfriend to be able to watch TV on DTV. I know an API would be better but I imagine this would be a 10 minute hack that we could use in the interim.
Democracy Player is awesome, I tell everyone about it.
cheers
Mark
September 17th, 2006 at 8:38 am
Mark, these are great ideas, thanks. We’ll try to get them done for you. And thanks for spreading the word!
September 25th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
democracyplayer %F
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/democracyplayer”, line 94, in ?
startapp()
File “/usr/bin/democracyplayer”, line 43, in startapp
import singleclick
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/democracy/singleclick.py”, line 17, in ?
import app
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/democracy/app.py”, line 427, in ?
import frontend
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/democracy/frontend.py”, line 42, in ?
import MozillaBrowser
ImportError: libgtkembedmoz.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
September 25th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
you know this is my 2nd or third try at this app, tried it on fc3, fc4 - now fc5. No luck, looks so nice in the screen shots…
October 10th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Hi aaron,
I got the same problem and I found out that it was failing because in /usr/lib I had mozilla-1.7.12 and mozilla-1.7.13. The problem was that it was looking for all the libraries in the mozilla-1.7.12 folder while they all are in the mozilla-1.7.13 folder!
So I just created a soft link (as root):
ln -s mozilla-1.7.13 mozilla-1.7.12
That solved the problem.
October 10th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Are you using the packages from the website? Did you install with –nodeps?
October 11th, 2006 at 6:34 am
Yes I downloaded the rpm from the website. But I didn’t install with -nodeps.
After my comment here I noticed that this issue is addressed in the installation notes where they provide a better solution. I guess I should read it more carefully
October 12th, 2006 at 4:39 am
Buggy as hell. I downloaded it and attempted to get it working on my Fedora Core 5 box but was greeted with dependency hell.
libgtkembedmoz.so… I fixed that problem, then another, and another, and another etc.
After six hours of being able to get it to finally load properly without crashing, xine wouldn’t co-operate so I was able to download stuff, listen to audio but not play anything. No video at all.
I attempted again on my FreeBSD box but gave up. Realised it wasn’t worth it.
I tried on Ubuntu and it worked okay but I did need to do some tweaking. Program works better under Debian-like systems I feel.
I agree as per previous statements… this program has great potential but too buggy to even be considered at this point. If it takes six hours to setup and install then its really not worth bothering with, for a couple of movies.
On the version I managed to get running, I found it memory hungry, slow and quite cumbersome.
Perhaps in six months (1 year!?) this program may be quite worthwhile but for now, there’s too many issues with it.
This program is IMO still in the alpha stage.
October 22nd, 2006 at 9:31 am
I was wondering if Democracy Player would be able to load a bit quicker. I run Windows XP and I find that DP is somewhat slow to load. Perhaps it is just the computer that I have,.. perhaps something else, perhaps such as the size of DP ?
October 27th, 2006 at 2:30 am
Hi,
for your information, Mac users can view flash video on the main screen by installing a plugin to view them on quicktime.
Perian 0.5
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/30931
November 28th, 2006 at 6:37 am
Wow, what a bunch of whiners! Just kidding, I know it’s frustrating when something doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped.
For me, though, Democracy is GREAT! There are obviously a few tweaks still required, but they don’t stop me from proclaiming that it’s the best and easiest way to download video, torrents, whatever. It’s simple, the layout and storage makes sense, and it thoughtfully is set up to not clog your machine up as a default.
Thanks, Democracy!
December 18th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I downloaded the dmg for Mac OS X. Installed and started up with ease. The only problem: the in-screen parts of the GUI are showing in French (although the menu bar and options are in English). I can’t find a preference for controlling this. How do I change to English???
December 31st, 2006 at 5:11 am
Great promises, delivers quite a lot, bugs a bit. One thing that can be said is that .flv files play really smoothly compared to those displayed in the browser (Safari) and THAT is simply great!
FYI:
Democracy v.0.9.2.1
Mac OS X 1.4.8 (build 8L127)
PowerBook G3 Firewire (pismo)
500 Mhz G3 processor - 512 MB RAM
ATi Rage 128 Mobility w/8 MB VRAM
Bug:
Internet searches will always generate multiple instances of previously downloaded videos (Google Video and You Tube) in the New Videos playlist, prompting me to delete the doubloons.
Comments:
Launch time is painstakingly slow. I’d blame that on my oldish laptop, but I’m quite sure there is room for a lot optimisation. Another annoying thing is the systematic channel population at launch; I’d like to be able to “dumb down” Democracy, barring it from downloading the latest channel info so I can simply jump to the “search” channel or read previously acquired content. Current behaviour taxes both processor and bandwidth before enabling the user to get on with simple tasks such as searching, organizing or playing content.
The way I see it now, Democracy acts like iTunes when the default startup behaviour is set to connect to the iTunes store; I want to use Democracy the way I use iTunes: search and play my music without any forced online content updating.
The GUI (Mac OS X) is a bit unwieldy, I’d love to help improving (e.g. toning down size and colour) the interface. I’ll see if I find the proper channel
In the lines of iTunes (again), it’d be great to be able to rename the files from within Democracy, so as to let Democracy keep the proper file linking; naming conventions (i.e. as per YouTube) make spotting a specific movie VERY annoying, especially when a collection grows. A “reveal file” option (select file and ctrl or command-R) would be an excellent addition (maybe it’s there and I simply haven’t found it yet).
Other than that, excellent work.
December 31st, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Robert– thanks for the thoughts. A lot of this will be addressed in upcoming versions, especially startup time. Please keep sending comments our way as new versions are released.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
i am using it for a week then suddenly it is minimized and not maximize. i tried to uninstall and reinstall several times but with no effect