Boxee, a media center for the modern world

Boxee is an open, connected and social media center for Linux and OSX (Windows not supported yet).

At the moment it is still in an Alpha stadium, but I haven’t had much problems with it.

At the moment you will need an invite to be able to use Boxee, not to worry, I’m giving them away.

After you installed it and logged on, you are greeted by a modern, good looking interface.

(the bar with system info isn’t on a default install, I added it myself)

As you notice you get recommendations from friends, you get info on the stuff you recently used or added.

That’s why it’s a social media centre. You can share stuff with friends, recommend things to friends, …

It plays videos, music and pictures from you pc (or from a server) and it can retrieve those from the internet (last.fm, youtube, flickr) also.

On each file you get metadata telling you a little more about the item you are trying to open, and if the metadata is missing you can add it yourself.

I must admit that adding metadata yourself isn’t that easy as you would expect. Also, I doesn’t seem to recognize the metadate from the files on my computer. The metadata from internet sources is good.

I’m not going to list every thing Boxee can or can’t do, you can do a google search for that.

But I do recommend the Tekzilla video review here or the Pcmag one here.

I took some screenshot of Boxee running, I might as well share them.

Videos

Music

Pictures

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Some bugs with the current alpha I experienced and were fixable.

– slow navigation on intel based graphics cards

Solution –> http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=189&highlight=vsync

– bad video playback (greenish or 4 squares) on ATI cards

Solution –> http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=319

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This is the best Media Center software today, and it isn’t even finished, and I absolutely love it.

2008

08/31

CATEGORY

Software

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