Miro 2.5 released!

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date and not representative. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

We released Miro 2.5 today. It's a great release and a big step for Miro. My favorite features are:

  • audio playback that doesn't suck

  • handling for torrents that have folders and multiple files in them

  • video/audio tabs instead of new/single

  • totally redone database layer

The last feature is a big deal--we rewrote the entire storage layer for Miro to do it. Miro went from a pickled Python object database to a relational database. With the new database system, you can do things like this:

willg@mercury:~/.miro$ sqlite3 sqlitedb
SQLite version 3.6.10
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> select count(*) from feed;
23
sqlite> select origUrl from feed;
dtv:manualFeed
dtv:singleFeed
dtv:search
dtv:searchDownloads
dtv:directoryfeed
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/5/14/1911312/timostrailers.rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gitcasts
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/googletechtalks/videos.rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Screencastersheathenxorg
http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/speeches.xml
http://www.hd-trailers.net/blog/feed/
http://pycon.blip.tv/rss
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSS-Tricks-Screencasts
http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/podcasts/6/XPlay_Daily_Video_Podcast.xml
http://feeds.theonion.com/OnionNewsNetwork
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YourWorldIn5-itunes
http://g4tv.com/cinematech/podcasts/8/G4_TV_Cinematech_Video_Podcast.xml
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/f/e/fedoratv/fedora-tv.xml
http://openmeetings.org/archives/ovc2009-sessions-mirofeed.rss
http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/rss
http://makezine.com/blog/archive/make_podcast/index.xml
http://www.podshow.com/feeds/gbtv.xml
sqlite>

This is the first big step in making Miro more hackable and more accessible to projects like Coherence, Elisa, and others. It'll also make it a lot easier to debug database problems in the future.

Note: After you've upgraded to Miro 2.5, Miro will upgrade your database to the new structure on the first startup. This takes a long time depending on how big your database is. Just let Miro hang out and do its thing. The epic fail here is that there's no ui indication that Miro has started and is upgrading the database. I'm hoping we'll fix that soon.

I hope you're happy with the improvements in Miro 2.5. We're not resting there--work has already begun on Miro 2.6.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.