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Democracy brings together many of the threads of Internet-based video. To start with, it's a decent video player that supports most common formats. I'm not saying it's the only player you'll ever need, but if it does come across a video that it can't play, it politely hands it off to an external application. Democracy itself lets you watch in a window or go full-screen, which is especially good for high-definition content.

Democracy revolves around the idea of channels, which are essentially RSS feeds. If Democracy's channel guide doesn't have what you want, simply paste in the feed of your choice. Well, that's the idea - it must be admitted that not all feeds are compatible with Democracy.

That's fine for downloading content from web servers, but what about torrents? Democracy includes a BitTorrent client, so the user experience is much the same whether the feed points to files or torrents. And BitTorrent is a proven technology for getting large files onto people's computers.

Want to watch and save videos from YouTube or Google Video? No problem.

However good the technology is, everything comes down to content. While one aim of the Democracy Project is to keep "online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers," it's also about participation: the organisation behind Democracy is the Participatory Culture Foundation. Consequently, there's plenty of amateur content of varying quality.