Benjamin Higginbotham with TechnologyEvangelist.com.
With me, I've got Nicholas once again, from a Participatory Culture Foundation.
Those are the guys who make "Democracy Player".
-Nicholas, welcome! -Hi, how are ya?
Doing great, how about yourself?
Amazing, thanks.
So, you guys are on the cusp of releasing Democracy Player 0.9.5,
it just kinda rolls right off the tongue.
Tell us a bit about this new release.
Yeah, this is a big update for us,
it's the biggest update you'll see before our 1.0 comes out.
We have a lot of important stuff in here, a lot of it's behind the scenes,
but some of the stuff you'll notice is a redesigned interface,
it's smoother and simpler and slicker.
We have some nice things like the MAC users,
it will generate thumbnails automatically.
If you want to download a video and don't have that yet for Windows or Linux,
that's something that we're definitely working on.
There's proxy support, better BitTorrent support.
It does a better job resuming downloads if something gets interrupted.
And all in all, I just think it's a smoother and cleaner experience,
and it's a big step towards the update coming out.
You know, one thing I noticed is that as each build keeps getting released,
the system seems to use less and less RAM, and get faster and faster and faster
in its ability to playback files and download files.
'Cause I remember working with the beta, I think it was 0.8 or something like that,
and it was a pretty big RAM hog.
How are you coming on with the optimisation of Democracy at this point?
That's definitely a big focus for us as you know with the past few versions
we've done a lot to reduce the number use, improve the speed and that's
going to be something that we continue to work on.
It's not clear right now whether we will be doing some big changes before
or after 1.0, but, you know, over the next 6 months we're going to continue to see
much better performance, but using less resources, feeling faster more responsive.
So, we have to see that as important.
You mentioned that this is one, at least I believe you mentioned, that this is
one of the final releases before 1.0, or at least close to your road to 1.0.
What do we have left to get to 1.0? What can we expect in 1.0?
The big thing that you'll see in 1.0 is stability and we'll be doing a lot of
bug fixing, trying to nail down some of the last final bugs that we haven't been
able to fix so far. The biggest challenge on our end for that is just being able to
reproduce the bugs; finding a system where we can see it happen because there
are so many different kinds of setups out there that a bug may only happen in
those specific circumstances, and that makes it hard for us to track it down
and fix it. Once we see it happening, you know, we can always fix it, and so
stability, fixing bugs is definitely the biggest priority.
There's also just a few finishing touches - we wanna make easier for
people to use remote controls with Democracy Player if they have something
like that. I have a few more ways that people can customise and interact with it,
so it's mostly gonna be cleanup around the edges, but I think it'll feel
a more complete experience.
One of the biggest things that's about to happen is we're going to be renaming
Democracy Player and we've found a lot of people get confused by the name and
when they first hear about it they think that it only has content related to
politics on it, which is definitely not the case and not what we intended with
the name, so we feel like it's important for us to find a new name. We have one
that we think is gonna work, we're just going through some legal stuff and we're
obviously getting a new icon and website design so as part of that
1.0 process we're gonna be launching a new name, new style for the player and
that's gonna be big too.
But the final thing, and what I think is the weakest part of the Democracy Player
experience is the channel guide; we're rewriting that from scratch.
The version you see now is based on some existing software that is out there and
doesn't exactly meet our needs.
So what we're doing is starting over from scratch, making something very fast,
very responsive and once we have a good foundation built
we're going to be doing a lot of work to add a rating system, find more ways to
trickle off the best content.
As we've seen the channel guides reach nearly a thousand different channels,
it becomes more and more important for us to find ways of filtering the best stuff.
So we wanna make it easier for people to share channels, rate channels,
and see what people really like and not just subscribe to stuff that looks
attractive on the surface or on the guide.
It feels like the next natural extension for Democracy Player's gonna get is
PNP support such as PlayStation portable, the video iPod or other small portable
video players and I know that's not currently a feature of Democracy Player,
at least the ability to take the videos that I've downloaded and push it to these
other devices, mainly because it's extremely complex.
The video iPod is going to take a totally different video format than the PSP which
is going to take a totally different format than a Place4sure mobile device.
Is that on your roadmap to add, and is that gonna be a 1.0 feature or later?
And how are you gonna deal with that?
Yeah, syncing portable devices like that is definitely something we wanna do.
It's not gonna happen for 1.0.
We feel like our mission for 1.0 is to make a solid and excellent desktop app
that you can use every day and really rely upon.
That's what we wanna do for 1.0; get a good foundation in place.
From there we'd like to see Democracy Player be able to get us
content out on more different devices, get it onto your TV more easily,
on any portable devices that you're using.
So we're going to start tackling that.
It may come in stages and it may mean that we start with the ability to
sync to the most powerful devices to sync file formats that they already play.
Then, later on, we add the ability to transfer from one format into another,
so more of your videos are able to play under iPod, for example.
That's definitely coming for us.
Nicholas, last time we talked, we actually went to you and that time, iTunes was
one version lower and it didn't have good video support.
Since then, iTunes has added a whole new video catalog, you have episodes of
shows and movies and whatnot, and they've changed the way they deal with video.
How does that compete with Democracy? Does it compete with Democracy?
And why are you better and different than iTunes on that front?
Yeah, iTunes has made some improvements to the video software but the focus they
have is really on accumulating a collection of videos, for example,
movies that you buy off of the store, music videos that you buy from the store,
and accumulating a certain kind of collection.
Our focus is more on the flow of the internet.
The flow of videos that is becoming more and more a part of peoples'
online experience.
I think we're really offering an experience that's very different and
goes way beyond the approach that iTunes pitched.
The channel model that we have really lets you handle lots of videos coming in.
Seeing what's on a variety of channels, organising that in different ways and
I think we still have them beat in terms of video experience.
From a publisher standpoint, I think the big differentiator between Democracy
and iTunes is torrent support.
I can directly download a torrent video file and as I'm publishing my
high-definition 1080p videos, which we do, the bandwidth is taken off of me and so
now I no longer pay for the full distribution of the file,
or maybe a little bit now.
And I think that's really one of the big, powerful features of Democracy.
You guys get kudos for having that from the beginning.
That's really what makes you guys different and stand out from the
rest of the crowd.
Yeah, I think that the BitTorrent support that we have is definitely something that
iTunes can't compete with and we also have a lot more flexibility with video formats.
Both on Mac and Windows now, both able to play Flash video files which are the most
popular online video files now.
And a lot bigger variety of formats than you can play on iTunes or
Windows media player or anything else that tries to be a video organiser
or video downloader.
Well, Nicholas, it's a great product and we always enjoy chatting with you and
I hope you'll come back soon when you release version 1.0;
whatever it'll be called at that point.
-Thank you so much. -You have a great day.
I'll definitely come back. You too, take care.