Democracy Player is a free and open source Internet video player that allows you to choose from a variety of channels, subscribe to video feeds and view them with the integrated player. It can automatically download videos from RSS-based “channels”, manage them and play them.

Democracy Player keeps online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers in one place. Once Democracy Player downloads to your computer, install it and start it up. You will see the channels that come pre-subscribed with the player, and you can subscribe to new channels in the Guide. Hit play on New Videos and any new videos will play one after the other. Democracy Player can be as simple to use as turning on your TV.

It’s been a year since the first official release of the Democracy player and podcast client. Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially released, to celebrate its birthday.

What’s new in this version:

1. Refined interface. simpler, smoother, easier to use.
2. Share menu. New “share” menu on each item lets you email a video or post to Video Bomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit.
3. Partial proxy support. We are halfway done with proxy support. You should be able to use Democracy Player with no problems, but you won’t be able to access the Channel Guide from within the player. You can get to the channel guide on the web here.
4. VLC 0.8.6 on Windows. We’ve upgraded the version of VLC that powers Democracy Player for Windows. This version has much better flash video support for sites like YouTube.
5. Videos stored in folders by channel. Videos that you download from video feeds will now be stored in a folder with the name of the channel. This should keep things much more organized.
6. Pause / Resume downloads. Long awaited! You can now pause and resume any download or all downloads.
7. Better BitTorrent support. BitTorrent performance is significantly improved.
8. Show seeding on torrents. In the downloading tab, you can see all the torrents you are currently seeding and you can stop them if you choose to.
9. Drop-down for auto-download. There’s a new drop-down menu on each channel that lets you set the Auto-Download mode without going into the channel settings.
10. Thumbnail generation on OSX. On Mac, if you have downloaded a video that does not have a thumbnail, we will make one automatically.
11. Details section. Each video item has a “details” button that will show you any additional information we have about the video. This includes details about torrent status, the filename of the video, the full description, etc.
12. Retry downloads on network errors. If your internet connection gets interrupted or if something else goes wrong with a download, Democracy Player will automatically retry. Very helpful.

Download Democracy Player version 0.9.5 at http://www.getdemocracy.com/downloads/.