We all know what democracy should be right? Even if some political parties don’t seem to fully follow those guide lines… but earlier this week I discovered that democracy can also be a media player. Now if it were your average player I would not even speak of it since Windows Media Player 11, Winamp 5 and Quicktime 7 are pretty popular and known out there.
What I love about Democracy is it’s emphasis on IPTV, by that I mean you now have program that can easily let you gather different videos to download onto your system. Whether it be a funny video from YouTube or a Vidcast about technology or video games. You can add “channels” using the RSS subscription feed to have Democracy download the new shows automatically as they are released. There is a expiration system that auto-deletes old episodes after a period of time (you can change the default expiry or save the file so it is never deleted). The player supports pretty much all video formats out there and has support for torrent files and can download videos from Flash video service. This means you can have all your personal videos in your library AND download movies from YouTube or Google Video to your hard drive.
The product is pretty strong and still has a way to go before version 1. The two features I feel are missing is the option to reduce to tray and let it run in the background. If you want it to download a show you need have the player open and take space on your desktop. Same would happen if you download a large torrent file. The other thing I’d like is the ability to come back and forth from a video to the different channels. Because each time it interrupts the playback. You can get it at getdemocracy.com and they are at version 0.9.2 it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows.