Hack a Day » mediacenter

Boxee available for Ubuntu

Benjamin Eckel — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:20:00 +0000

The Boxee blog has recently announced that they have finally released a Linux version. So far, only Ubuntu 7.10 through 8.04 support is available. We covered Boxee when they released their alpha version a few months ago. One of the unique things we found about it was the added social layer that allows the user to share their viewing and listening information on various social networking sites.

This XBMC based media streamer has won a lot of praise lately and we are excited to finally see it step into the Linux platform. Up until now, Boxee was strictly run on OSX 10.5 and thus bound to Apple’s hardware configurations. Once they get a stable version running, it will be extremely easy for anyone to build a media streamer from an old PC with various hardware configurations.

Streaming Netflix to the Xbox 360

Eliot — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:50:00 +0000

We were just as excited as anyone when we heard about Roku’s Linux based Netflix Player, but not being ones to spend money on hardware, even $99, we’d much rather use something that’s laying around that’s not living up to its full potential. Lifehacker has a guide for using vmcNetflix to stream Watch Instantly movies to the Xbox 360. vmcNetflix is a Media Center plugin. When the 360 was originally released, you could only get Media Center by buying a new PC, now it’s included with Vista, meaning people might actually use it.

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.