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Grey Matters Internet TV!

Published on Sunday, December 21, 2008 in

(Mirrored from the Grey Matters Blog)

Get MiroGrey Matters now has an internet TV channel available on Miro!

Miro, if you're not familiar with it, is a freeware program that acts as a sort of DVR for internet videos, and that can handle almost any video format you throw at it. Besides using it to watch videos you already have saved to your hard drive, you can search several video sources at once, and download those to watch at your leisure. Yes, Miro even makes it easy to download YouTube videos to your hard drive!

In a similar manner to a DVR, the videos will ordinarily be deleted from your hard drive after a specified amount of time. The default is 6 days, but you can specify storage times from 3 hours to 1 month. Of course, if you find a favorite, you can easily tell Miro to keep it on your hard drive permanently. Miro will both manage your hard drive space (you can tell it to keep a certain amount of hard drive space free) and organize your video collection.

Another way to discover videos about your interests is Miro channels. These are akin to TV channels, but can be created by anyone on just about any topic! Using Miro to organize these channel can be a great way to keep your favorite podcasts manageable. A Miro channel is basically a specialized type of RSS feed, and they're available for free.

Now, I've tried to keep Grey Matters Videos going, but a blog is proving to be the wrong medium to keep the videos organized. Creating the Grey Matters Miro Channel is a far better medium for what I want to do with Grey Matters Videos.

To take advantage of this new video channel, first download, install and run Miro. If you're just getting it up and running for the first time, you may want to watch the pre-installed Using Miro channel to become familiar with it. To add the Grey Matters Miro Channel, copy the following address:

http://members.cox.net/econalc/files/gmvideosmiro.rss

Next, go to Miro, and from the Channels menu, select Add Channel..., then paste the above address into the box and click OK. As it's brand new, there are only 9 videos from around the web at the moment, including the Martin Gardner documentary I discussed in my previous post. Note that even though it isn't hosted at a site such as YouTube, Miro can still find it, download it and organize it with no additional trouble.

Since it's easier to add a video to a Miro channel than to create a blog entry around it, this video collection will grow over time. I won't be adding all of the videos from Grey Matters Videos, but I will leave that blog up so you can find any past favorites. The purpose of the Grey Matters Miro Channel, however, will be the resource for all the future videos I add.