Ironwolf

Personal Video Recorders, like Tivo, let people timeshift content to match their best viewing times. We are now entering the age of heavy video content on the Internet, and so far there hasn’t been an easy and free way to acquire, view, and manage it all. But thanks to the people at the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, the free and open source Democracy Player is now available for Mac OS X and Windows (with Unix on the way).

You tell Democracy what “channels” (RSS feeds) of content you’re interested in, and Democracy uses BitTorrent technology to download the latest videos from all your sources in the background, and lets you to automatically expire the shows some time after you watch them, or keep them forever. The built-in channel guide lists a huge amount of content, which is growing daily, and if you create content it even makes it easy to add your own channels. There are even hacks that allow you to download and view mainstream content.