Miro improves search and torrenting

Miro's search bar now lets you search all its engines at once.

(Credit: Participatory Culture Foundation)

The open-source, DRM-free video platform called Miro (download for Windows and Mac) has just released an upgrade with two small but useful improvements. A new search feature lets you search all available sites simultaneously, and torrent support has been greatly improved.

The new torrent support is instantly noticeable. It doesn't compete quite on the same level as torrent-only clients like uTorrent and Azureus, but then, it does a lot more. Miro's like a torrent client, RSS reader, video player, and video discovery agent rolled into one. You can set it to automatically download torrent files via RSS, then run the torrent and play the video file once it arrives all from the same interface that you can surf YouTube. That's pretty darn fancy.

Miro has revamped its torrent-downloading for the better.

(Credit: Participatory Culture Foundation)

There are nine Web sites you can search and download from in Miro, from the majors like YouTube, Google Video, and Yahoo Video to Mefeedia and Revver. Being able to cross-search them is a great and logical feature to have, one that would do well in other apps like Firefox.

It's hard not to sing even louder praises for Miro, which conquered most of its notorious stability problems at the end of last year to release a product with compelling features. You can set channels to download regularly, so you'll never miss an episode of CNET Download.com videos or CNET TV. You can also set the downloaded episodes to expire, so you don't have to worry about clogging your hard drive. In addition to all that, Miro's Web site includes instructions for how show producers can use the platform to distribute their content.