Democracy Player 0.9.5 Released
We have just released version 0.9.5 of Democracy Player. This is a major update, with lots of new features and an interface overhaul.
Download it here: Democracy Player 0.9.5
_______________________________________
What’s new in this version:
Refined interface. simpler, smoother, easier to use.
Share menu. New ’share’ menu on each item lets you email a video or post to Video Bomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit.
Partial proxy support. We are halfway done with proxy support. You should be able to use Democracy Player with no problems, but you won’t be able to access the Channel Guide from within the player. You can get to the channel guide on the web here.
VLC 0.8.6 on Windows. We’ve upgraded the version of VLC that powers Democracy Player for Windows. This version has much better flash video support for sites like YouTube.
Videos stored in folders by channel. Videos that you download from video feeds will now be stored in a folder with the name of the channel. This should keep things much more organized.
Pause / Resume downloads. Long awaited! You can now pause and resume any download or all downloads.
Better BitTorrent support. BitTorrent performance is significantly improved.
Show seeding on torrents. In the downloading tab, you can see all the torrents you are currently seeding and you can stop them if you choose to.
Drop-down for auto-download. There’s a new drop-down menu on each channel that let’s you set the Auto-Download mode without going into the channel settings.
Thumbnail generation on OSX. On Mac, if you have downloaded a video that doesn’t have a thumbnail, we will make one automatically.
‘Details’ section. Each video item has a ‘details’ button that will show you any additional information we have about the video. This includes details about torrent status, the filename of the video, the full description, etc.
Retry downloads on network errors. If your internet connection gets interrupted or if something else goes wrong with a download, Democracy Player will automatically retry. Very helpful.
Bug fixes and other little touches.
That’s a lot of new stuff, let us know what you think!
A COUPLE FINAL NOTES
-As we move closer to version 1.0, we are focusing more and more on bug fixing. If you find any bugs in Democracy Player, please tell us by filing a bug report. The more details you can give, the better.
-Mac users: there is a rare bug on mac that prevents the application from launching. We will be switching the Democracy Player database in the next version to correct this. For now, you can get the application to launch again by deleting this folder: open your Home folder (it has a picture of a house on it), then go to the Library folder, then the Application Support folder. Once you are there, find the folder called ‘Democracy Player’ and drag it to the trash.
-Ubuntu users: we now have our own repositories to help you stay up to date more easily. Add it once and you’ll find out whenever we update. How to install on Ubuntu.
February 13th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I am experiencing a crash on launch although I deleted the folder in “Application Support”!
February 13th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Robby– is this on a mac? What kind of crash, do you get an error?
February 13th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Robby: I had the same problem. In the crash report it said “CaminoZoom”, so I hunted around in /Library/InputManagers (both in the home directory and the root).
Try to remove everything in InputManagers and see if it works. For me, it was sufficient to just delete the CaminoZoom bundle. Hope it works out for you.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Great news, sadly my gentoo got broken so I can’t upgrade the package but I’ll bug the people at gentoo-sunrise so they do it for me, as for the ubuntu thing that’s great the old package had many problems I’ll try it tonigth
February 13th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
“Videos that you download from video feeds will now be stored in a folder with the name of the channel. This should keep things much more organized.”
If only Democracy could go back and sort my existing saved videos by channel. Democracy knows where my files are (reveal local file) and it knows what channel the file is stored under. How difficult would this be to implement? It would be immensely helpful!
February 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Looks Fabulous! Keep up the great work!
February 13th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Rock! Democracy is seriously the app for which I most look forward to updates.
February 13th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
You geniuses!! I’m an Ubuntu user and real happy that you sorted the repositories out; and the upgrade has fixed all trouble I had playing videos.
I’m a very happy bunny.
February 13th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
can you tell me if this works in Vista OS?
thanks
February 13th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Bill– it does work on Vista, however, we’ve heard that VLC has problems sometimes and so some people may not be able to play videos with this version. I assume VLC will be fixing any problems soon and then we’ll update.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I like the interface changes (more information present) and so far no technical hiccups on this Mac version.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
The changes sound great… but it keeps crashing on me. I’m on an intel mac and it just bounces on the dock a couple times and thats it. Any ideas?
February 13th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Great work guys, it just keeps getting better. When will there be support for an OPML export or some way of backing up your feeds.
Also you guys really should be talking to the guys at Songbird. There is definite room for collaboration there.
Steve
February 13th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
…this isn’t working for me at all…
Is there any way I can get the previous version back?
February 13th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Alex: I had the same problem on my Mac. I followed a tip above that mentioned “/Library/Input Mangers”, and through trial-and-error, discovered that it was UnifyCamino causing the problem. Above, someone mentioned CaminoZoom. It could be one, the other, or something else, but it does seem like an input manager extension may be causing issues. (Thankfully SIMBL seems perfectly compatible.)
February 13th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
I’m on a Mac and I can’t get the program to start either. There are only three things in my ~/Library/InputManagers/ and none of them have anything to do with Camino (I have no other InputManagers directory on my system). Here’s a dump of my crash log:
You know what, forget it. I feel like a jerk posting this much text into a forum. Is there an email address or something I can send it to?
February 13th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
I’m having the same problem on an Intel Mac running 10.4.8. It bounces a few times and crashes. The crash log says:
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0×0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0×0002) at 0×90a619d8
. Any ideas??
February 13th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Hi everyone– we are aware of the conflict with the Camino extension.
I’m not sure about the other launch problems. Any extra info would be great. You can email it to me at nicholas-at-pculture.org or file a bug report at the link above. Thanks!
February 13th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Pause / Resume downloads = standing ovation!!!
So many more reasons to love it and a few steps closer to version 1.
Congratulatios team!
February 13th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Guys, I am trying to make new releases available on http://www.GTKFiles.org but it is always a challenge to find the release notes for each new version. Please link new release notes from the bottom of the download page. Looking at the blog is not a natural way to find what’s changed. Thanks.
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/Democracy_Player
February 13th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Completely useless to me - like every single other method that delivers video over the internet - because the very first thing to get stripped out to save file size and bandwidth is….
closed captioning.
Until there is a method of delivery and a method of playback that preserves subtitles or captions, I, and many many many other people who need captions to understand or follow dialogue, will be left out in the cold.
It is fucking embarassing there is not a single video capture solution for a computer that will handle captions properly. Not a one.
February 14th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Mencoder can handle subtitles, actually. The fucking embarrasment can cease.
February 14th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I had the very same problem as my previous posters on OSX with the InputManagers. However after updating both GrowlCamino and UnifyCamino Democracy had no more problems with them.
So if 0.9.5 crashes on you mac box try to get the latest updates for your InputManagers. Thats probably a good idea anyway :).
February 14th, 2007 at 2:32 am
Problems thus far:
(Ubuntu Build, btw)
- Player crashes on video’s end.
- Unable to save / close preferences window.
I guess I could’ve solved the problem with the video crashing at the end by switching the preferences from ‘Play videos one after another’ to ‘Steop video after playback’ - but I cant even save the prefences. I can open and change them, but they wont save when I close the window… which i have to do with the ‘x’ because the close button’s unresponsive.
Can anyone direct me to the directory where the preferences file is kept, so I can try editing it manually. All my new downloads are saving in the default directory…
Cheers.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:40 am
“If you’re upgrading Democracy player, just ‘replace’ your existing version and your Channel subscriptions and video collections will remain.”
what do you mean with that? just installing other the old one. deinstalling the old one first? I don’t wanna lose all my channelsettings.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:58 am
good work, but i can’t download google video files and on the german version you see $langerProgName on Top
February 14th, 2007 at 6:07 am
Does this version allow you to adjust the font size?
February 14th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I’m getting the crash on launch too. I’m on an iMac running 10.3.9, and it’s occurring even if I remove the Democracy folder from Library Support. In the Console, I’m getting an EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION in Thread 0 (Code [0]: 0×00000002 & Code[1]: 0×000091cc).
Oh, and I noticed when I restored by Democracy folder (in Application Support) from a backup that my dtv-downloader-log had somehow ballooned up to 9.73GB (yes, that GB). Hope that’s fixed in the new version.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Democracy is freakin awesome, you folks have all my love.
I can’t force myself to struggle to use it though until it has the ability to stay out of my way and stay -in- the systray like it should. Please add systray support!!
(This is definitely in the forums too!)
February 14th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Why when you do a search are so few records sent back?
For example, on youtube in democracy i search for “the daily show” and only get 20 odd records back. if i search on the web i get loads more.
is there simply no paging functionality and it only returns the first x number of records?
…also, what exactly is the bit torrent support? all i see is a bunch of channels and the ability to search various video websites… help anyone? :p cheers
February 14th, 2007 at 9:08 am
¡Infortunio!…
Tras 20 minutos desde que lo vi y aun me sigo riendo, este error me ha aparecido al ejecutar la nueva versión de Democracy, y la traducción no tiene desperdicio, sin duda me quedo con…
…cayó presa de algún tipo de confusión inter…
February 14th, 2007 at 11:41 am
I second what riskin said yesterday. I would be nice for Democracy to know I’ve just moved 80 odd Frederators to the new and much more organised Channel Frederator folder and the same with all the files from my other smaller channels. And also to get back the thumbnails.
A possibility for a future release?
Only a relatively minor niggle though. Great work on moving Democracy forward another notch or two with 0.9.5
Keep it up.
February 14th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
iv’e just downloaded the new version but reading all your comments I think i’ll stick to the old one, it’s spot on at the moment. What’s the point in messing all my set-ups up when i’m happy with this version. Call me in 6 months haha
February 14th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
So I updated Democracy on my OS X 10.4 (PPC) system and now it seems that almost all of the text for the UI is in German! This wasn’t the case under the previous version of Democracy I was running. Help!
February 15th, 2007 at 2:39 am
I’ve noticed that when i start up democracy its showing multiple copies of the same file, ie two or more of the same new or downloading file. i delete them and next time i open sometimes they are gone and sometimes not..
weird bug..
on another note…
nice work will be using it all the time, how about a inbuilt converter to save to 3gp or something nice like that. mobile democracy in the near future, now theres an idea..
Sean, aka sprocket2cog
February 15th, 2007 at 6:12 am
My Intel Mac running 10.4.8 can’t open it. I tried deleting the files other users have suggested but to no avail. It looks like Download.com is still hosting 0.8.2…
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0×0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0×0002) at 0×90a619d8
February 15th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Thanks for added the Ubuntu update. I’m glad you’re supporting us. You the best player so far. PenguinTv is ok but I like that all-in-one player feel.
February 15th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
In version 0.9.5 i can’t download google video files on my mac. I dont understand why. I wish it could work like itunes can download google video files but in format mp4, it seems very good more quality in video than flv. My wish : democracy player allows me to choice video format to download. My preference is MP4.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
getting digg video rss feed to work on democracy would be awesome. I love just scanning those top 10ish videos every other day and having them autodownload would be great.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
I downloaded a previous version of the Democracy player and was able to download from Google video a couple of times, however I must say that just fairly recently in the past few weeks all of a sudden if you try to download from them it will say “file not found.”
I don’t know if this perhaps will be fixed in a later edition but I thought I should bring it up considering I use the windows/english version and I noticed people using Apple or a German version having the same problem. I was thinking perhaps Google has stepped in a blocked downloads but that is only a guess on my part. Anyways take care guys and hope you can find a way around the block.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I’m on a Macbook Pro running OS 10.4.8, and I’m having some uploading inconsistencies. Even after I stop seeding my files, Democracy still registers an upload speed of 20-30kbps. I can’t find what is being uploaded. Any suggestions?
February 15th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
reward drawer– our developer is curious if this continues to happen if you quit and restart. does it? thanks for the info.
abaddon– not sure about the google video problems, but we’ll look into it.
February 16th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Looks good but seriously needs OPML/Feed Export.
Peter
February 16th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Restarting it solved the problem. Now the upload rate matches that of the things I’m seeding. Cheers Nick
February 16th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Bug report link was not working when I tried at 5:50 a.m. PST 2/16/2007.
Bug is that Revver content does not show ad at the end. The folks that make the content can’t make money from it if “Democracy Player” grabs content without showing the Ad link. No ads, No content from the little guy. That’s what Revver does. Democracy Player kills that which it claims to promote. I hope its a bug and not a feature.
February 16th, 2007 at 8:01 am
David– the Revver incompatibility is a bug. We’re talking to them about ways to solve it.
February 17th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Thanks Nick for responding.
Also If it turns out to be something on my end I would like to know because it feels odd to me that one week it is working and the next it isn’t. Have a good weekend.
February 18th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
OMG! I have the xplay podcast, and with almost 500 vids on it, it would take version .0.9.2 about 5 mins to load that menu (after every video too) on my FX-62. This one loads it in seconds. FING AMAZING. _THIS_ is the version ive been waiting for! The auto retry is also rox. GJ!!!!
February 20th, 2007 at 5:15 am
is there any chance that I can get democracy to run on my KISS dp-558?
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Well Done of the best RSS aggregators available hands down!
I do have one problem though, Why does it take what seems ages for Democracy to load? this does not seem normal, and even with this latest version it is taking 3-4 minutes in load time. I would like to see the load time issues resolved soon. Its kinda hard waiting for the podcast goodness…
I am the producer and host of http://www.BattlefieldPodcast.com and we promote you on all of our websites, as well as on all of our video podcasts.
Keep up the great work D-Team
Mark “G.I.Jersey”
BrokenEggsMedia.com
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Correction!
Apparently the update didn’t apply correctly, and I was still running the previous version. After applying the update (User Error Correction)
All is right with the world, and Democracy loads super fast now!
Thanks D-Team!
Mark “G.I.Jersey”
BrokenEggsMedia.com
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Hi Mark– glad to hear this version is working better for you. We are going to be working to speed up load time on a future version, but I can’t predict exactly when.
March 1st, 2007 at 12:43 am
I wish you that your “pioneer”-software grows to THE reference for video-players at v1.0.
Therefore two minor bugs (in the german installed version):
1.: The Progamname in the taskbar is shown as “$langerProgName”
2.:when opening Hilfe->Über Democracy Player (=help->about…) it says:
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://dtv/content/about.xul
Line Number 12, Column 4:
—^
Much Luck in finding the bugs;)
March 1st, 2007 at 2:36 am
Is there any way to add my whole “My Videos” folder at once? At the moment I can only add them one at a time which is quite a task
March 1st, 2007 at 2:52 am
Just an addition above, the mpeg playback seems to be very grainy and in one case it just doesn’t work at all
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Since upgrading to 0.95 on my Core Duo Mac Mini at OSX 10.4.9, I’m seeing a great (and increased from previous) deal of beachballing.
Others?
March 5th, 2007 at 12:38 am
I’ve been having the same “File Not Found” problem with Google video as user Abaddon and as reported here :
https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/
It started a couple days ago, and happens with any search term. No file can be downloaded, even though the videos exist on the google website.
Running windows XP SP2, and Democracy 0.9.5.2.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
PROBLEM 1:
Redundant copies of videos I’ve already downloaded appear again and again, each time I launch Democracy Player; even if I delete the duplicates, they reappear. I have auto-download NEW for youtube searches saved as a channel. I don’t know if DP is downloading the same videos again and again or simply adding duplicate entries to its list but this is annoying.
PROBLEM 2:
I cannot choose a filename for downloads from youtube.
I would like to be able to browse downloaded files with ZoomPlayer and have some kind of meaningful file names instead of gibberish. It would be really nice if DP could use the title of the file on youtube as part of the filename, for example.
PROBLEM 3:
I cannot DELETE an item from a youtube search saved as a channel. Oftentimes these searches on keywords contain spam, which I’d like to manually delete from the channel so it won’t get downloaded automatically.
PROBLEM 4:
DP says there is a ‘new version’ available every time I startup but the latest version is 0.9.5 and this is the same version I am running
Thanks
March 19th, 2007 at 12:27 am
Hi Greg - here’s are the quick answers to your reported problems, I’ll get back to you later on the other two.
1. Duplicates: There is an open ticket for that #4905 in the tracker. It is one of our priority tickets to get fixed.
4. Available Version: If you are currently running 0.9.5 - you may be getting that message because there were a few updates. Windows is now at 0.9.5.2 and OS X 0.9.5.1.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:17 am
2. Rename files: There is a Save File as, ticket assigned to our wishlist (#4160). I am not sure where that falls in the list of features to be implemented. Storing items in a directory named after the parent channel is the most recent improvment towards file organization.
3. Delete feed items: Your best bet would be to make a new ticket for this as a feature request. I am not sure how possible it is because the feeds are generated based on the search parameters.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
0.9.5 for the Mac keeps crashing while downloading videos. I managed to keep it open by pausing all but 1 or 2 downloads. If I leave it downloading more, it crashes within a minute or two.
March 19th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
I’ve also put that in as a trouble ticket.
March 23rd, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Ubuntu Edgy user here … your repo tells me a 0.9.5.3 version should be available (after sudo apt-get update) but the repo doesn’t have it (404 error after sudo apt-get upgrade). The repo only seems to have 0.9.5.1. Here’s the repo I’m talking about:
deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/democracy/linux/repositories/ubuntu edgy/
March 31st, 2007 at 9:11 am
Doesn’t work on Vista. Same problem as last version. No Video, only audio. Very disapointed.
August 28th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Hannah Montana tickets…
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