![]() Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA)Ĭontainer formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support) Boxee's video player can pretty much tackle any type of non-DRM-protected media you can throw at it: Supported formats/codecs: I have run into various issues with sound dropping out (usually sudo alsa force-reload and then restarting Boxee fixes it), Boxee and Ubuntu hard crashing, as well as just complete Boxee sluggishness when navigating the menu and trying to play media (for some reason small MPG files do not like being played back with Boxee).īut once you do get it working and assuming you have at least respectable hardware (unfortunately video hardware acceleration is not yet supported), Boxee flies. Depending on your setup, you could have quite a quandary on your hands. I should start this section by saying Boxee is alpha software. I learned the hard way.ĭetailed Boxee Audio Playback Settings Performance Pro Tip: Setup another Boxee account as your "guest" so your Boxee friends don't call you out on watching a Beyonce music video when your guests use your Boxee machine. I navigate Boxee with a keyboard but I only need to use the arrow keys and enter/escape buttons so if you have a wireless remote control, mapping keys should be a pain-free process. Firing up Boxee for the first time is quite an experience. That being said, this post comes from my usage of Boxee and as such I won't be mentioning much of Boxee's Internet video streaming, built-in BitTorrent client, Python plugin system and other such features.īut I digress. I'm using it to painlessly manage the stockpile of media I already have on my HTPC. In addition to Boxee helping your friends make media recommendations for you, many users flock to Boxee for it's native support for many online video streaming services (unfortunately Hulu was recently pulled). That's not a big deal though, playback is fine, you just can't tap into Boxee's special sauce - sharing things like recent plays with friends, rating media and viewing media information such as movie summaries. I'm not certain if Boxee looks at metadata/ID3 tags only or if it also tries to infer titles based on filenames, but it only recognized a few TV shows and movies out of a terabyte of my media. There are a few issues here and there depending on your hardware and software setup and for that a bit of poking around the Boxee forum should help out.Īfter installation, I just added a few folders as media sources (supports Samba network and UPnP shares too) and Boxee had no trouble listing my content, even downloading album/media artwork when it automatically recognized some of it. Installation was a breeze and you folks are smart, so I'll just skip talking about that part. In the background, the HTPC runs a hellanzb daemon that is configured with my giganews newsgroups account, making it a near-perfect media box. The Linux HTPC currently runs Ubuntu 8.10, an experimental Nvidia driver for the motherboard's integrated graphics and has the same Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. While I have yet to fully settle into a true Boxee setup with a wireless remote control (perhaps just a simple Apple remote if I can get a USB IR receiver and write a driver for it), I'll still be using my same HD setup to test out Boxee. They describe it as the "open (based on XBMC), connected, social media center for mac os x and linux." Test Setup But let me backtrack a bit - what is Boxee? As you can probably already guess, it's a media center front-end of sorts for your computer. In the last several months, Boxee has received 4M in funding so they're definitely going somewhere. I've had a Boxee account since June but only started using it in the last two weeks that I've had it installed on my HTPC. Using a keyboard and mouse to navigate through Nautilus and manually play videos through VLC player isn't exactly the best living room experience. ![]() Why was that? There was no easy interface for me to work with all of the media files I had on the HTPC. When I wrote that I couldn't live without my Vudu box, I already had a Linux HTPC hooked up to my TV and still thought Vudu rocked. Review: Boxee Media Center (or Going HD: Part 4) ![]()
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