Hack a Day » alpha

Hackit: Boxee now on Windows

Eliot — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:18:51 +0000

Boxee, the free media center management and streaming application, is now available for Windows platforms. We’ve been following the developments of Boxee since we first announced its alpha this time last year. At that time, it was only available for OSX with promised Ubuntu support. We were a bit skeptical about the interface noting, “Unfortunately all the dynamic resizing, animated, sliding, floating info boxes make it behave like the zooming user interface’s retarded cousin”. Our interest in Boxee was almost entirely based on it being a fork of XBMC, the media center project developed for initially for hacked Xboxes. It was interesting to see Boxee become the interface of choice for hacked Apple TVs and then go mainstream with a big push at CES.

Have you been using Boxee as your media center? What do you love/hate? What about alternatives like XBMC, Plex, or MythTV?

Posted in HackIt, home entertainment hacks

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope first alpha released

Eliot — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:42:29 +0000

The target release date may be over five months out, but the Ubuntu team is already pushing the first alphas of Jaunty Jackalope out the door. The new release is not for the weak and is intended solely for people who want to vet bugs and contribute to the project. The release is designed to bring Ubuntu back in line with Debian. One of the areas they’re working on is the ARM port (we saw the Debian version on the G1).

[photo: Kordite]

[via Download Squad]

Posted in android hacks, downloads hacks, g1 hacks, news

Boxee on the Apple TV

Eliot — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:59:02 +0000

Boxee, the social XBMC, is now easy to install on your Apple TV. We first covered Boxee in June when the alpha was released. It’s great to see how much the project has advanced to this point. To install on the Apple TV, you first download a USB “patchstick” creator. The program puts a mac partition on the drive and copies over the necessary files. You reboot the Apple TV with the stick installed and it patches in both Boxee and XBMC. When you restart the the device it will have two new menu items and the rest of the system will be intact. [Dave Mathews] shows the entire process in the video above. He notes that they’re currently not taking advantage of the GPU, so 1080p is a little too much for the system.

Posted in home entertainment hacks, macs hacks, xbox hacks

Boxee social media center public alpha

Eliot — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Boxee is the latest piece of software to enter the home theater PC space. It’s recently become available as a public alpha. The first build is only for OSX 10.5, but Ubuntu is coming. Built on the XBMC code base-they even hosted the XBMC developer con last weekend-it has the same goal of letting you navigate and watch/listen to all of your media from your using just a remote. There’s more than just that though.

What Boxee adds is a social layer. In the application, it shows your friends’ viewing activities. You can add account info for various video services to get to your saved playlists and subscriptions. You can download podcasts and send your listening habits to Last.FM.

Your online profile can be hooked to Twitter, FriendFeed, and tumblr, which can publish your recommendations, what you’re watching, what you’re listening to, and what you’re rating.

It’s only alpha so you can expect some quirkiness, and no user guide makes it an adventure. We love the look of the interface. Unfortunately all the dynamic resizing, animated, sliding, floating info boxes make it behave like the zooming user interface‘s retarded cousin.

What about the OSXBMC port we covered last month? The developers have decided to fork the code and develop it independently from the Linux port. It will still be nearly in sync with the Linux port, but they’ll have the freedom to removes things that are broken or unnecessary.

In any case, it’s great to have two fine media center replacements for Apple’s Front Row.