Boxee Beta, part 1

Geek Said:

A while back I started playing with the XBMC derivative called Boxee. I joined the early access beta group and when they jumped from Alpha to Beta I took the plunge and was very pleased. The Alpha was just XBMC in sheep's clothing in my opinion, not much different. The Beta on the other hand shed some skin and introduced a whole new experience. Boxee is on a mission to create one fantastic media center UI.

The primary reason that Boxee caught my eye was it's cross platform nature which had carried over from XBMC. Having the same UI on Mac, Windows, Linux is very important to me and the functionality of an HTPC environment throughout the home. Teaching my family to use multiple systems is definitely not the answer... I keep my family operating system agnostic, they are exposed to Mac, Windows and Linux in hopes that they learn how to complete a task with the tools that are available and not just specific tools. FYI: Microsoft Word is not the only word processor in the world... surprised?

The first thing to remember about Boxee is that it is not a DVR/PVR and has no intentions of becoming one. This is much different than MythTV, Windows Media Center, and EyeTV which is the primary function of all three of those systems. Boxee's purpose is to provide a simple UI to access multiple media sources from local media files to Internet based streaming services like Hulu and major TV network sites. The Beta goes a long ways toward simplifying access to those various streaming providers. It's not perfect but there is hope one day it will be seamless.

The second thing to remember is that it is still in Beta which means there are significant bugs, the advantage is that Boxee is under constant development and new versions are available on a fairly regular basis. Although that can also be a disadvantage because something that was broken may now be fixed and vice versa. I hate the vice versa but it happens.

I have to add, even though Boxee doesn't have DVR functionality that doesn't mean you cannot connect to your DVR media. As a MythTV user I used a couple of scripts that create symlinks (shortcuts) to the mythtv files with names that Boxee can correctly interpret for cataloging the recordings.

This has uncovered two issues with my current environment. My main MythTV backend also serves as a frontend in my family room. Running Boxee, it is incapable of HDTV MPEG2 playback (the MythTV ClearQAM recording format), however those files playback fine in MythFrontend. Most likely that's an issue with VDPAU support within Boxee...I'm sure that will get resolved at some point, but it doesn't work now. The second problem is that my wireless network is definitely not fast enough to stream HD content which is very disappointing to me because I cannot watch recordings in my bedroom where "She said" and I watch the most TV.

At this point I am not sure what part 2 will bring but it will be coming soon.

Geek out...