I’ve been teaming up with our new volunteer moderator Abraxias to get the support and discussion forums in better shape. We’ve cleaned out the spam, replied to a bunch of questions, and I just created a couple more open-ended discussion forums. In the process of blocking some spammers, we temporarily blocked everyone, but we have it fixed now. So if you haven’t been at the forums in a while, try em: Democracy forums.

p.s. I’m thinking of switching us over to Vanilla forum software. I’m not sure how easy it is to make the conversion, but I like the simplicity of that software. Any thoughts on this pro or con?

We’ve just posted a bug fix release for Democracy Player. The most important fix should solve the startup problems that some Mac users have had. The problem was caused by a conflict between versions py2app (which turns our python code into a Mac .app) and some common input managers like Growl and a Camino extension. We’ve upgraded to the latest py2app and it should be fixed. If you still cannot startup on Mac even with this version, please let me know.

We’ve also fixed a problem on Linux that prevented preferences from being saved. We really should have caught that before we released 0.9.5– sorry! New Linux source and Ubuntu packages are up now. Ubuntu users should get the update automatically from our repository.

On Windows, there was an odd bug that could get Democracy into a state where the window was cutoff or very small and couldn’t be resized (if you quit the app and then made the window really small before it actually quit, the window would stay stuck too small). So, if your Democracy Player is stuck in an un-resizable state, get this updated version.

Download Democracy Player 0.9.5.1

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Steven Jobs recently published an open letter that calls for the major record labels to drop the requirement that online music stores include copy-protection technology on their music files (DRM). He writes, “Convincing [the major labels] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.” There may be some inconsistency here (why doesn’t iTunes let independent record labels opt not to have DRM on their music?) but overall, I think Jobs is absolutely correct.

Here’s what I’m wondering: does Steve Jobs’ anti-DRM stance apply to video? Will Disney / Pixar insist that their movies be sold online with no DRM? Does Jobs want to create a “truly interoperable video marketplace”?

There’s been a lot of good coverage of the 0.9.5 release this week. We’re on the Download.com (and they have a whole lot of feature requests for us), there’s a good post on NewTeeVee about 0.9.5 and our plans for 1.0, and Technology Evangelist put up this video chat interview with me (note the extreme angle!).