We’re very excited to announce a big new Miro project, that we’ll tackle with support from the Knight Foundation, to make local video more accessible than ever.

The project is called Miro Local TV, and it will be an open source tool that will let anyone build a local video community in their city and town, around all the great content that’s already being posted to video blogs and large video sharing sites.

But we’re not just building the code and casting it out there. Rather, we’ll be partnering with local public or public access stations in 5 cities and towns this year (and 12 more next year), so that each of these sites will be run by existing media orgs with deep roots in the community.

We’ll be posting more about the project as it unfolds, but I definitely want to thank the Knight Foundation. They’re doing extremely creative grantmaking, from the Knight News Challenge open competition to investments in the open web.

If you have an idea for ways technology can support local journalism and are looking for funding, submit it to the News Challenge (you have a few more hours).

Redhat has recently been touting the hardiness of open source software during times of economic crisis. In light of our current slowdown, I figured a post about connecting your computer to your TV would be fun. You can use Miro and/or a lot of other free software to make finding and watching media from your computer a living-room-worthy experience.

The Nuts and Bolts

Step one is physically connecting your computer to a television or projector. I won’t go into much detail here, because there are lots of useful guides that cover the basics for mac and PC. This video shows the port-types. Once you get the computer connected, it’s on to the fun part.

Browsing and Watching Media

Step two is to decide how you want to access your media — you could just use Miro directly, but sometimes it’s hard to navigate inside Miro (the interface wasn’t designed to be used while sitting 10 feet away). You can also add a media center program that will give you access to all the media on your computer through a nice menu/playback system (with very large fonts, etc). A great option for Windows, Mac, and Linux is an open source app called Elisa. Alternatively, for Windows, there is Media Portal, and Mac iTheater.

These media center apps usually allow you to scan your computer for media and sometimes to “watch” a particular folder for new videos. You’ll just need to configure your media center app to watch the folder that Miro downloads to.

These are the default locations for Miro videos:

Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\My Documents\My Videos\Miro\
Mac: /Users/(your username)/Movies/Miro/
Linux: /home/(your username)/.miro/Videos/
(our dev intern, Jason Brower, made a short video about how to couple Elisa and Miro on Linux)

Gaming Consoles

I won’t go into much detail here, but you can often hook a game console up to play back media from the network (sometimes the console needs to be modified though). A few things to check out are: XBox Media Center, Wii Media Center X (not open source), and PS3 Media Center X (also not open source).

DVR “TIVO”

If you want to go totally crazy and have a way to pipe cable into your computer, it may be worth checking out MythTV, which is a free and open source Digital Video Recorder (DVR). The simplest option to install/use it is probably Mythbuntu, which lets you burn a CD and boot live into the application. Be warned that MythTV is a deep rabbit hole, and can get pretty complicated!

Caveats

Not all media center software can play back all video formats — so if Miro downloads a Flash video (.flv) and your media center software doesn’t support it, you’ll have to watch it through an alternative app. Another issue is that when you watch a video in your media center software, it won’t necessarily be marked as watched (and expire itself) in Miro. Remember you can always connect your computer to your TV and just use Miro as your media browsing/watching program — don’t diss it till you try it.

Have Fun!

We may eventually add a media center-like interface for Miro, but for the time being there are lots of ways to watch Miro programming on the big screen. If I’ve left out any fun or interesting programs for going from computer —> to television, please let me know. Also, if you’ve got a DIY media center setup you like, tell us about it in the comments.

YouTube made a few technical changes (a day or two ago) that affect Miro’s ability to access the videos. Our developers are working on a fix right now — we’ll keep you updated.

Update:

We should have a fix for the YouTube issue with version 1.2.8 (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux source): http://www.getmiro.com/download/

We’ll let you folks try it out and if everything’s kosher, we’ll push it through our automatic update system.

The DMCA 512 safe harbor provisions are a piece of legislation intended to, “[limit] the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users(1).” EFF reports this law has been used maliciously to (temporarily) remove official John McCain campaign videos from YouTube.

Essentially, anyone claiming to own the rights to a particular video can at least temporarily derail the content. This is due to part of the DMCA that requires service providers (web hosts, video hosts, etc) to immediately and temporarily take down a video as soon as a copyright complaint is made against it. The intent of this portion of the DMCA is to shield service providers who may be hosting infringing material.

Here’s an example of how it works: Viacom can file a claim when they find an entire episode of the Real World on YouTube. Upon receiving the claim, YouTube must immediately remove the video in question for a minimum of ten days. The video poster also receives a message allowing them a chance to respond. If the claim is disputed, the poster can file a counter-claim and the video in question will be made available once again, after the ten day period passes. Any further dispute over that particular video must be settled directly by the claimant, counter-claimant, and court. This procedure allows YouTube to avoid liability for infringing material hosted on their servers

However, this system has a fatal flaw, in that anyone can make a bogus claim against a piece of legitimately posted media and have it removed for a minimum of ten days. If no action is taken to counter the request, the material will be offline indefinitely. A DMCA request can be sent from anywhere in the world and can easily be spoofed by a malicious party. This loophole is especially significant for activists, politicians, and journalists who may be posting extremely time sensitive material.

The McCain takedowns certainly aren’t the only case of DMCA takedown abuse — opponents of the Church of Scientology have been barraged with totally bogus takedowns that were orchestrated by a subsidiary of the CoS.

Another example: the city of Blackwell, Oklahoma issued a takedown notice against a YouTube video depicting a city police officer macing a man seated on the driver’s side of his car. The video was obtained by the man’s family through the state’s open-records law. No matter the details of the conflict, the video was clearly fair use and was unlawfully taken down at the request of the city. These stories are just a few of many — DMCA takedown requests are extremely easy to make, and if made pseudonymously, they are great tools for overt censorship.

The McCain camp asked for special treatment of the campaign videos, but the request was shot down by YouTube yesterday. The DMCA is a knife that can cut both ways, as John McCain, Obama supporters, and political activists from all camps have seen. The real way to solve the problem is changing the DMCA itself; namely, removing the mandatory ten day waiting period and allowing counter-claimants to immediately restore their media.

⁽¹⁾ DMCA, Wikipedia