14 DAY TRIAL // The world of video players has been more and more active over the years and, starting with the most trivial video players around, we have reached to use complex DVD players, Internet TV players, players that play only certain file types, etc.
The world of videos has also been improved and if in the past you had to search the whole Internet to put your hand on a video, now all you have to do is access one or two websites and find it. There are websites that are hosting tons of videos both home made as well as videoclips of your favorite artists.
I have found a pretty unusual player that is designed to retrieve video files from different websites. In fact, it is very similar to a feed reader, only this is the video version. Democracy player is the result of Participatory Culture Foundation and it is free. To tell you the truth, it is the first tool of this kind I have seen and it does not look bad at all.
The interface is unlike any free software I have seen. It is not complicated and it can compete with some really good commercial products on today's market. Democracy Player is strictly designed to download and play videos on your computer.
The Channel Guide will offer the possibility of subscribing to a number of video channels. All the channels presented in the list are free so you will not have to pay a dime for the subscription. They are displayed by category (nine categories) and you can find videos related to Business, Arts, Animation, Comedy, Creative Commons, Education, Family, Food or Health. In the side bar on the right the user has the possibility of browsing the channels and sorting them alphabetically, by category or popularity.
The list of channels is continually growing and each day new channels and videos will be added. Scrolling down, you get to see the popular tags and the number of videos they include. Each video presented in the list has a couple of options: download in view of a future watch, star it, share it or going to its webpage.
The channel bar on the left is divided into three sections. The first one is dedicated to activating the Channel Guide, viewing the movies in My Collection and the newly added and downloading videos, as well as searching for a video using one of the video hosting websites available: YouTube, Yahoo!Video, Google Video, Blogdigger, Revver or DailyMotion.
The video feeds are the second section of the right side bar. Here, there are the channels you have subscribed for. The user can create folders and name them according to his/her wish. Adding channels to the folders is as easy as dragging and dropping them in the folder.
The third section is sheltering the Playlists. You can create playlists and drag and drop the videos in there. I have to warn you that the downloaded videos have an expiration date and when that date is due I guess they will be removed from Democracy player. But you can save them so that they will be stored on your computer. In the Preferences menu, under Edit, you can change the default path for the movies directory, as well as the number of video downloads at once.
Democracy can function as a torrent client and you can open the torrents to download with it. Unfortunately, I may have downloaded a torrent that could not connect to the tracker as it did not start the download. You must be aware that the details about the peers, tracker or number of files are not available, as it is not a "professional" torrent client.
If the user does not want to download videos from the available channels s/he can add them at any time, as long as they can be updated and the videos downloaded with Democracy. All it is needed is the URL.
The Good
Democracy is a good alternative to looking for videos by yourself in a dozen places. Using this software will bring all the movies from different video channels at your fingertips. It is easy to use and the free subscription offer is quite impressing.
The Bad
I never got to download a video using torrents. Some of the videos did not download as the host websites were down. Be careful with the memory usage, as the application tends to go over 100MB.
The Truth
It is free and working. I was expecting some videos not to be downloaded as all the subscriptions are free, and for the torrent download, that's no problem as I have my own torrent client that gives me all the information I need about the connection, tracker and the peers.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
