Hacking the AppleTV to make it ostensibly better has long been an underground hobby of mine. I upgraded my hard drive and tried to add plug-ins but this may be the holy grail of ATV mods. Boxee basically adds full media center capabilities to Steve’s box and turns the old menu into something glorious to behold.
Installing Boxee isn’t easy. You need to boot the install from a USB drive and hope for the best. However, once it’s up and running you have social media functions – playlist sharing, for example – and the ability to bring in desktop and online media onto your TV. You can also add services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr.
While Apple doesn’t condone this behavior, you can also install Boxee on other devices like media center PCs. It uses XBMC, a homebrew media center system to make everything look wonderful.
I never seen anything like this social network before. How does this help bloggers if you can comment me back and explain please
I’m going to try apple TV soon. BTW, RHT is hot this morning. I’m so glad I didn’t invest in YHOO. RHT is a steal.
Can it pull Divx from a network drive?
yes, it can play divx from a network drive as well as a bunch of other formats
Thanks Avner – very cool
This is really only a quarter of the equation. XMBC is pretty cool. But in my opinion is still bringing things to the viewer in the wrong way. Because really who wants to read twitter on the big screen on it’s own. Now the way to do it would be to mix it in to tv viewing or movie viewing in a growl type way with a HUD that allows you to interact with it through a keyboard or iphone. all while still watching tv/movie. And not to mention it almost brings to much functionality to the media center. I don’t know, I have been trying a couple of different skins for XMBC on my mini and it just felt pretty but clunky to move around compared to frontrow and with plugins. Don’t get me wrong I’ll check this skin out when I get a sec though.
to Andrew if this is using XMBC, then yes you can play many different codecs. But then again you can with regular apple tv too with a little fiddling.
boxee is now about viewing Twitter on the big screen. we actually don’t have this feature.. it is all about an entertainment experience. the social aspects of boxee are very basic at this stage, and we intend to enhance them as we move into beta.
hope you’ll give boxee a try and can give us your feedback.
@ Avner I would love to try it out if you want to send me an invite. I don’t know if you have it, but it would be fantastic if you had solid eyetv integration built into boxee. I’m very much into the idea of a true mac media center. I have had a form of mac media center for over 10 years now and would love to see a strong media center with social networking done right.
sure. just send me an email to avner [at] boxee d0t tv
re eyetv. it’s on our to-do list for 2009.. :)
Boxee is great – but it is Alpha and it shows in some places. For example, I would like to be able to use it on a Mac with a mouse, not keyboard only.
At the end of the day, I think that Boxee is really going to be something to behold in about 1 year. They have a great interface and a strong opinion about what it means to add ’social’ to your viewing habits.
Great work so far Boxee, keep it up!
[Avner - it's good to see that you have you are watching for these articles and reaching out to people for comments]
hi joe,
you can enable the mouse by going to Settings->Appearance in boxee.
but the UI is not well designed for a mouse (we had Apple Remote and Keyboard in mind). we’ll improve it in the next release.
avner
Let’s not forget Boxee also runs on OSX and Ubuntu. I have it running on my Mac mini and LOVE it!
thanks man!
…any chance to make it running on the PS3? Maybe on an installed Linux partition?
running boxee on PS3 would be great.. but it should be made easy to install
A dedicated ubuntu image with autostart for the media center should work. It’s really easy to install a Linux partition on the Ps3
true, but it needs to be easier if you’d like to make it relevant for the common user
Not easy? It was easier than jailbreaking an iPhone.
It’s part of the standard user interface! How much easier can it be? I just don’t understand why no one is making a ububtu image with a media center for the PS3…
I fought with boxee for two days straight until i made it run smoothly on ubuntu (video card issues and more). For an alpha it is pretty cool – It has a tidy and functional User Interface, minimum critical bugs and an overall fun feel to it. Plus it adds Avner as your default first friend..And Avner sure does use it a lot, so you get some cool recommendations..
I miss volume control (or is it there and I was too dumb to press the +/- buttons??) and the menu controller that appear on XBMC. I sure am going to follow the evolution of this gizmo. Way to go!