If you read Planet Miro, you may have noticed that I was recognized in Will's blog for the volunteering I've been doing on Miro. I've been planning on mentioning my participation for some time on here, so this seems like a good time for me to do so.

It's been fun. But most of all, it's something I feel is really important. Television is the most consumed medium in modern western culture, and with the internet, there's a chance to shift it away from its original place of control by just a small number of megacorporations toward something that's as democratic as the web. There are a lot of IP-TV systems emerging, but Miro's the only one that really takes open and decentralized video playing seriously.

That's still a pretty vague explanation for why I think this is so important. Hopefully I'll find some time to really flesh out this reasoning soon, because it really does matter to me. In the meanwhile I can tell you that there's a lot of really exciting development happening in SVN trunk, including an entire user interface overhaul. We're switching the codebase from a lot of embedded HTML to actual widgetry. I guarantee that Linux/GTK has never looked better, and the code is getting a lot cleaner too with significantly less fragmentation across platforms. It's also faster and more featureful. Right now though, we're still in the process of reimplementing a lot of the old code. I wouldn't run from trunk right now, especially because it changes the database in a way that makes it incompatible with the last stable release. So if you upgrade to the development code, you're stuck with it. Don't worry, SVN is evolving at an astonishingly fast rate. It's already more enjoyable for me to run SVN than the last stable release, but I really should re-emphasize the fact that there are still a lot of important features missing.

The Miro people also sent me a t-shirt for the volunteering I've done. I picked the pretty one with the bird, and it's already one of my favorites in my collection. I might buy the exploding TV one soon too.

This has been really fun. It's nice to work on an application that's not web related and which is used by a lot of people. And everyone from the core Miro team has been really great to work with.

2.0's gonna be awesome. You'll see.