Passive entertainment with Democracy TV

I'm a little surprised others haven't leapt on this. A Free Software fork of (small "t") television that uses non-proprietary formats and appears able to handle all of those too. It's even apt-getable on Debian experimental, and Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows ready.

TV without the commercials, content from around the globe, censorship busting, ...

It's only recently I bothered to even look at YouTube, just to test out the software I'm using, but Democracy TV makes all that software look like it might even be useful.

Has anyone else looked into this? How do they get around the proprietary codec "binary blob" problem?

I hope this thing takes off bigtime. Imagine streaming video from Tianenmen Square during the revolution, or from the Berlin Wall, or World Cup for that matter. :-) I'd much rather see news from people on the ground seeing it live, than from jerks like Dan Rather.

The last time I looked at it there were no RPMs for Mandriva, and the Fedora RPMs flagged too many dependency issues, and the source tarball failled to build. I might try again, with the Fedora RPMs, now that I've got Smart installed. Smart helped me sort out the dependency issues that using the SuSE RPMs for Mono caused, and I was able to install Beagle and the evolution addins, so I can now search my email.

I did look a bit more into it, and it appears it is still in furious bug squash mode; usable, but not for long, unstable, works for some, not for others, & etc. Their blog is a good description as to how usable it is. Definitely not yet ready for prime time, but I do like the idea.