Democracy, the open source, web-enabled video player, is set to release a new version and would like the public's help [testing the first final release candidate][2]. The new Democracy Player 0.9.6-rc0 includes some nice new features like the ability to watch any folder on your computer for new videos, resume playback functionality, more keyboard shortcuts and better Windows Vista compatibility. The watched folder features is particularly nice for those that frequently download movies from sources Democracy doesn't track. Just set your movie to download to a folder and then tell Democracy to watch that folder and whenever it finds new videos they'll show up in the Democracy Player. I don't know that it qualifies as a bug exactly, but I did have one small quibble with the new watched folder feature. On Mac OS X the watched folder believes that .DS_Store files are new movies, when in fact they're just hidden system files that live in every folder. For the time being you can tell Democracy to skip these files and they won't be listed in your new movies section, but it would be nice to see the Player handle hidden files a little better from the get go. If you've never used Democracy, have a look at [our review from last year][1]. Democracy's standout features is still the integrated search tool for querying YouTube, Google Video, BlogDigger and Yahoo Video all at once. As for the stability I didn't have any problems, but keep in mind that this is pre-release software so exercise the usual cautions. [1]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/10/democracy_gets_.html "Democracy Gets My Vote" [2]: http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/05/help-test-democracy-player-096-release-candidate/ "Help Test Democracy Player 0.9.6 Release Candidate"