Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Democracy Player 0.9.0 has been released yesterday, which has been announced in quite a number of places already, e.g. Boing Boing.

It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux; if you're on Debian unstable the installation is as simple as apt-get install democracyplayer (I uploaded the new packages yesterday, they should have reached all mirrors by now).

If you want to know what this is all about, but you're reluctant to install yet another program, check out this screencast (MOV, 37MB) which shows the basic functionality and user interface and discusses some of the new features... I think you'll like it.

You can use it for all kinds of video blogs and podcasts, it'll download and play almost anything with an RSS feed.

No. Time. To. Blog. But these few lines I wanted to post nevertheless: there's some neat new packages in Debian since today: Nexuiz (nice ego shooter), rcov (code coverage for Ruby), and Democracy Player (RSS video downloader/viewer for videoblogs, packaged by yours truly, as promised).

That's all.

I stumbled over this video (5.2 MB) today, while watching videoblogs in democracyplayer (for which I'm preparing a Debian package at this very moment).

The video seems to be a bit older, and I have no idea who the original author is or what license applies to it. Anyways, it's funny, scary and very very true at the same time. Watch it.

Hanno Böck asks which free clients are available for receiving and subscribing to video podcasts, videoblogs, vlogs, vodcasts or whatever you want to call them.

I was asking myself the same question for a number of reasons lately, and here's what I have found:

• Armangil's vodcatcher is a video podcast client for the command line. Written in Ruby, cross-platform, GPL'd, no GUI (obviously).
• PenguinTV, an RSS feed reader which supports podcasts and video blogs. Written in Python, cross-platform, GPL'd, GTK+ GUI.
• kmplayer, proposed by Hanno Böck. Haven't tested it, yet.
• DTV (DemoTV), a "free and open-source platform for internet television and video. An intuitive interface lets users subscribe to channels, watch video, and build a video library". This looks like the most mature client right now (for Mac at least), and it has been ported to Linux just yesterday. It's written in Python, cross-platform, GPL'd, GTK+ GUI. I have filed an ITP and hope to have a Debian package ready in a few days. The DTV Linux code itself is pretty beta, any helping hands with porting would be nice (contact Nick Nassar and/or the devel mailinglist).
• Kitty, a podcast and videocast client for KDE. Written in C++, GPL'd, Qt/KDE GUI.

As for the content, there's lots of videoblogs out there, and I will blog about that in more detail later on. As an appetizer, you can now subscribe to the new (German) Tagesschau Video Podcast (thanks Tim Pritlove).

Update 2005-11-14: Added Kitty.