There are countless web sites that provide streaming content, either in an episodic or less structure form. Add to this the media files you already have stored on your hard drive and you have a lot of audio and video to contend with. Miro is a powerful media player that can be used to play local files, but is also geared up to playing online content from the likes of YouTube and Hulu. The application itself is nothing new, but the release candidate of version 5 of the program gives a tantalizing taste of what’s to come.

While there is a leaning towards video in Miro, the release candidate helps to highlight the fact that it can be used for other media as well. If you have a hefty MP3 collection on your hard drive, Miro can be used to listen to your favorite albums and while you’re doing so, you can take advantage of the application’s ability to go online and retrieve the correct album art and information for any track or albums that are incorrectly labelled.

The release candidate of Miro 5 features a range of handy updates

If you are a music fan, you’ve probably got an iPod or similar player that you take with you when you go out and about. Updating MP3 players can be a nightmarishly slow task, but Miro 5 helps to speed things up with accelerated automatic synchronization and automatic format conversion. There is not shortage of sites and services looking to sell you MP3, and if you’ve been on the lookout for another, support has now been added for eMusic.

Windows users have an updated backend to look forward to, but the release candidate has also be made available for OS X. For most people, Miro is all about streaming video, and this is still very much at the application’s core. While many of the changes and additions that are to be found in the program are music-centric, there is also the new option to download high definition videos from Vimeo.

You can find out more and download a free copy of the app by paying a visit to the Miro 5 RC1 review page.