Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet or a computer on a TV. Their free, open source, downloadable software for Mac, Linux and Windows brings all your entertainment into one place - whether it's from the Internet or from your hard drive or home network. Plus, they overlay everything with a heaping helping of social by letting you share what you're playing with friends on Boxee, Twitter, and Facebook.
The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same popular software and offers it up as a great device -- the perfect companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and more. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favorite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.
In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and We are Hunted as well as fun photos from sites like flickr, Picasa and the Facebook.
So get comfortable on that big old couch, grab your remote and see what it's all about.
Recently I presented the steps for hacking an Apple TV so that it could use boxee (yes, that’s small-b-boxee), the open-source media center application that allows that Apple TV to stream content from such sources as Comedy Central, Hulu, BBC, Last.fm, SHOUTcast, Flickr, and PicasaWeb to an Apple TV or computer. But what of boxee itself and its implementation on the Mac? That’s for today.
The big idea
The giant minds behind boxee describe it as a social media center. Using boxee you can play unprotected videos and music and view images that are stored on your computer’s hard drive or on devices on your local area network. Additionally, you can enjoy content from Internet sources such as Hulu, SHOUTcase, and Flickr. The “social” component is the friends you add (and who add you). Friends can see what they’re watching and listening to, with the idea that if your buddy Marty had the good sense to watch the latest episode of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, maybe you should too.
Download the latest version of Boxee for Mac. A good media center with online functions. Day by day we see how it's easier tto enjoy our photos, videos. Next you need to download a free application called ATVUSB-Creator (Mac) or ATV-Win (PC). 06) Run the ATVUSB-Creator The ATVUSB-Creator application is going to turn your erased USB flash drive into a “patchstick” that we can use to install software on your Apple TV. The team at Boxee has been scrambling all week to get ABC.com working in Boxee and today they finally were able to release a new version that does just that. The news is on the Boxee blog. CEO Avner Ronen announced: we have released a new version of boxee for Mac that includes support for.
boxee is based on XBMC, an open-source media player with versions available for Mac, Linux, Windows, and Xbox.
Getting
In order to use boxee, you need an invite. And you can get that invite in one of two ways. You can visit boxee and sign up for an invitation. As of today, that invitation will be slow in coming as there are loads of people who’d like access to boxee and the service is weeding through endless requests. The other way is to find someone who has a boxee account and ask them for an invitation. Currently, there’s no limit to the number of people someone with an active account can invite.
Once you have that invitation you can download the boxee application. Versions are available for the Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Navigating
boxee is designed with TVs and their remotes in mind. Although the Mac boxee application works perfectly well with a mouse and keyboard, you can be forgiven if you instead use an Apple Remote if one came with your iMac or laptop, or use the keyboard’s arrow, Return, and Escape keys to navigate around the interface. It lends itself to that kind of control.
The interface bears seven entries along the left side—Video, Music, Pictures, Profile, Downloads, Settings, and Exit. The local temperature and time are displayed in the bottom left corner.
When you select Video you’ll see options for Movies, TV Shows, Internet, and Sources. Select Movies and you’ll see movies you access locally—either on your hard drive or local network. TV shows, same idea. Select Internet and you have access to streaming content via CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Hulu, Movie Trailers, RSS feeds you’ve added, MySpaceTV, Next New Networks,. On Networks, Public Torrents, Revision3, and YouTube.
Sources is where you add locations that you’ve stored media. For example, if your iTunes library is stored on an external drive, you’ll want to add that source so that boxee can find it.
The Music entry works similarly. You can view local music by artist or album. Select Internet and you can get audio content via BBC, Jamendo, Last.fm, RSS feed, or SHOUTcast.
The Pictures entry can take you to local images as well as images stored on Flickr and Picasa.
Why it’s cool
iTunes is a terrific media player, but it’s limited to certain types of media and it’s unwilling to stream the majority of media on the Internet. boxee is far more accepting of different media types and is happy to incorporate any kind of Internet media it can lay its hands on.
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boxee and your TV go together like dill and pickle. This makes it a natural for an Apple TV. But it also makes adding a Mac mini to your home entertainment system even more tempting. If you’ve felt hampered by Hulu’s insistence that you watch its content on your computer screen, boxee mixed with a TV makes a lot or sense, regardless of how you do it.
The social networking component also makes a lot of sense. While viewing or listening to content you have the option to rate it with a simple “Love it!” or “Nah…” as well as recommend it to all or a selection of your friends. Presumably you trust your friends’ taste as they trust yours, making this a great way to discover new media.
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And, finally, it’s good for viewers as well as content providers. Those networks frustrated that viewers zip through advertising with their DVR’s controls may feel a little better that there’s no way to do that with the short commercials embedded in a lot of Internet streaming content. And because these advertisements are so short, viewers aren’t going to kick too much about having to sit through them, particularly when they have access to entire seasons of quality programming for free.
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