DIY Nerds

I guarantee that you will have a love affair with Boxee the same way I do.  I really can’t quit you Boxee (if you start charging it will be a messy divorce) BUT FOR NOW you’re free and together we will live happily ever after together. What other free program out there allows you to access thousands of free video content from all the major networks on Hulu, play music from Pandora, connect to social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and lets not forget Flickr. Boxee makes use of all those content providers, to your advantage, and piles all that content into one simple and clean design.  Then they take that awesome GUI (Graphic User Interface) and stream it straight to your living room television.  Boxee is an essential ingredient for any DIY Nerds out there.

The most important feature that Boxee offers me is the ability to not have to pay for cable television each month.  “Boxee has allowed me to replace cable with no remorse.  Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give up that option.  Services like Boxee, that allow users choice, are the future of television,” said Jef Holbrook (Stone, Brad. “Boxee, Used to View Web on TV, Generates Buzz.” New York Times 16 January 2009)

Quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee is a free download available at www.boxee.tv.  Boxee works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV.  With Boxee you are given a central access point to your entire catalog of photos, videos, and music on your local network plus access to a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and much more.

Boxee has recently announced a new box-top the Boxee Box.  Boxee’s post on the box has nothing in the way of details yet, so we will all have to stay tuned to the coming weeks.

Check out some of these screenshots

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How to install Boxee?

Boxee is currently available for Ubuntu Linux (Intrepid and Jaunty), Mac OS X (Intel-based Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV and Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista and 7). Check out the minimum requirements for Boxee.

To download the Boxee application you will need to register at the Boxee website and download the relevant version during the registration process. If you have already registered to Boxee in the past, just login to the website using your username and password, and click on the Download option in the menu to go to the download page.

Installing Boxee on Windows and Mac is quite a straightforward process, accompanied by instructions on screen. Just follow each and every step as requested, and the installation should complete just fine.

Installing Boxee on AppleTV

In order to install Boxee on the AppleTV you need to do the following:

1. Download the ATVUSB-Creator from http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/
2. Download the disk image of AppleTV 2.4 from http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-6242.20090624.Aq20P/2Z694-5660-02…
3. Insert a “bootable” USB drive into your Pc/Mac
4. Run the ATVUSB-Creator
5. Click on Choose a DMG and point it to the downloaded disk image
   
6. Click on Create Patchstick
   
7. Remove the USB drive and plug it into your Apple TV
8. Power on your Apple TV and the patchstick will run the ATV bootloader
9. After the bootloader finishes, remove it and restart your Apple TV
10. It now has options for Boxee / XBMC on the main menu
11. Click on Boxee, then select update launcher and  then update Boxee alpha
12. Once boxee is done installing, restart your Apple TV
13. Click “Boxee”

Installing Boxee on Ubuntu Linux

1. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources.
2. In Sources Software dialogue, select Third-Party Software tab, click Add, and enter:
   for Intrepid: deb http://apt.boxee.tv intrepid main
   for Jaunty: deb http://apt.boxee.tv jaunty main
3. After closing this dialogue you can either use Synaptics and select Boxee for download, or use a terminal window, and enter sudo apt-get install boxee.

Program Features (via Wikipedia)

Audio/Video playback and handling

Boxee can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the system’s DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), or eventually UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) shares (not available in v0.9.14). Boxee is designed to take advantage of the system’s network port if a broadband Internet connection is available, using the IMDb to obtain metadata information, thumbnails, and reviews on movies, TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via Freedb) for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Boxee can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Boxee can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.

Music Library

The Music Library is one of the Boxee metadata databases and another key feature of Boxee. It automatically organizes your music collection by information stored in your music files ID meta tags, such as title, artist, album, genre and popularity.

Digital picture/image display in detail

Boxee handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshow with “Ken Burns Effect”, with the use of CxImage open source library code. Boxee can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files; this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Add-on plugins (widgets/gadgets) python scripts

Boxee features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons functionality to Boxee, (using the easy to learn Python programming language), without knowledge of the complex C/C++ programming language that the rest of the Boxee software is written in. Current plugin scripts add-ons include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema guides, Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast), and much more.

BitTorrent client, interface, and torrent trackers

Boxee also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there are also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. Through Boxee’s Python plugin system it is also possible for the end-users to make themselves or add unofficial plugins made by third-party persons for other BitTorrent trackers.

Skins, skinning, and the skinning-engine

Boxee GUI source code is based on XBMC Media Center which is noted for having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. Users can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC (and Xbox) skins trading.