Boxee logo
In case you haven’t caught wind of it yet, Boxee has been changing the way people have been experiencing their tv, movies, pictures, and downloadable content. It’s a basically a media center program built on top of the XBMC project. What makes Boxee different from other media center software such as XBMC, Windows Media Center, MythTV, or even the Apple TV/Frontrow is its social aspect. Boxee shows you what your friends have been watching and lets your friends make recommendations for you. This makes it really easy to discover new movies, tv shows, and viral videos.
Another thing that distinguishes Boxee from the rest of the pack is its support for online videos. Out of the box, it supports Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Revision3, NPR, CNN, and many more. Boxee also supports viewing your pictures and listening to music from online services. It offers out-of-the-box support for Picasa, Flickr, Last.fm and many more. If online sharing isn’t your thing, you can always just view your own media. Boxee allows you to view content on your local machine and on any shared drives in your network. You simply point Boxee to the desired location(s) and it scans that folder for viewable media. Boxee also takes the liberty of adding artwork for you automatically when it discovers movies or music.
Boxee is currently available in public Alpha for OS X (10.4 and greater) and Ubuntu (8.04 and 8.10) and in private Alpha for Windows. You can install and start using Boxee by signing up for an account and downloading the installers. Stay tuned for parts two and three of this article. In part two, I’ll be detailing the install process on both OS X and Ubuntu, and in part three I’ll give my review of Boxee and let you know whether its worth just trying, or keeping around for a while.
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