i've been poking around the internet, trying out some of these new fangled "killer apps." well, i'm gonna talk about two of the newer ones that i've had no luck with.

first off, the democracy player. from their page:

Download and watch all the best internet TV shows and videos in one powerful application. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide. Stop squinting at tedious web videos– sit back and watch big, high resolution videos.

well…i've tried loading a few channels and downloading a couple of videos and i haven't gotten it to actually do squat. i still have yet to get it to play one of the stinkin' videos it's downloaded. color me unimpressed.

next up, we have songbird. from their homepage we have this nice summary:

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

the selling point is that it's supposed to be able to play just about anything…MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA, etc. sounds pretty sweet. except for when i tried to import my library of music (part of it, anyway). it seems songbird is choking on an initial import of around 10,000 songs. itunes this ain't, folks.

to be fair, songbird is really just a "proof of concept" release. it looks like a really swanky black itunes. as with democracy player, though, i actually have yet to get it to play a file of any sort.

oh well.

they both warrant some watching, for sure, but i'll hold off on playing with either of them any further until they actually have them working.