First Look at the Boxee Beta

Until now, the Boxee that we've known and tweaked was, at heart, an alpha-level geek toy—technically savvy, but funky to actually use. The just-released beta version makes TV, movies, Netflix, and other web content actually easy to enjoy.
We got a look at some screenshots and video from the unveiling, but we've been able to use early release versions of the Boxee beta on both Linux and Windows systems since then. Here's Howcast's helpful video, showing off some features and offering tips on getting started.

How To Get Started With Boxee on Howcast
And here's what's jumped out at us about this nifty little piece of software.
Click on any of the images in this post for a larger view.

Smoother playback and streaming, at least on Windows

Boxee is meant to be used on a media-minded, HDMI-connected mini-computer (a.k.a. a "Home Theater PC," or HTPC), or perhaps a laptop hooked up to an HDTV. There's a dedicated device, the Boxee Box coming in 2010 for "under $200." The Boxee team has also recommended a few devices that are small, relatively cheap, and utilize the NVIDIA ION graphics chip to provide HD-quality video without requiring other high-end hardware.
I'd already built a cheap-but-powerful Boxee setup, but for the beta release, I switched that ASRock Ion 330 to a Windows 7 installation, with Boxee set to load on startup. I did that because Windows is the main platform where Adobe "Labs" Flash 10.1 offers 3D acceleration for Hulu and other web video streams—although the Boxee Box will see accelerated Flash as well. It's also the best big-picture platform because Netflix requires Microsoft's Silverlight software to stream—not available, as you might guess, for Linux.


Running the Boxee beta on Windows 7, I've been very, very pleased with both downloaded video files and streaming content. Watching Hulu or other decently-high-quality video is akin to watching standard definition television, while streaming HD videos from Vimeo or YouTube feels like living in the future. Adobe will eventually (we'd hope) add hardware acceleration to its Mac and Linux Flash players, and Netflix may well make its way onto Linux systems. For the time being, though, the specially built Boxee Box or a Windows setup seem like the road to high-definition happiness.

Focus on content, not sites

In the Boxee alpha, when you wanted to watch a movie on Netflix, you launched the Netflix button, then navigated through that app's own interface to pick a movie or TV episode. When you were looking for a TV show, you'd head to the TV menu, pick the CBS, WB, or Hulu Feeds button (when it worked), then click-click-click to your show, and your episode.

Now when I want to check out that season finale episode of Glee I've been meaning to get around to (forever), I can head to TV Shows, start typing in G-L, and select it from the as-you-type results on the right. Boxee will ask if I want to stream this episode through Fox's own site or Hulu, let me know if they're ad-supported or not, and give me the alternate option of queuing this episode up, if I'm not ready for the sit-down yet.

It works this way for movies, too. Start typing in H-A-N, and if you wanted to stream Hancock over Netflix, head over and click on it. If you're on a laptop, or using Boxee's kinda awesome QWERTY remote in the future, it's easy, and clicking out two letters on a virtual keyboard isn't so bad with a standard remote, either.

The very handy Queue

Boxee's Queue feature makes this find-and-click process even easier. If I've added Glee to My Shows, it will automatically show up in my Queue, the right-most column on the start screen. If I happened to see a link to the Hulu page for that episode in my web travels, I could queue it up with a bookmarklet. Or, if I'm really into my serial musical dramedies, I could add Glee to the ever-present pop-up menu. When you get to Glee's page, the episodes you've already watched through Boxee have dimmed titles, which is quite helpful as well.

The Apps and social hooks

If Boxee did nothing but play back your video files and hook up to Netflix or Hulu, it would be, well, XBMC Live, or just an open-source Windows Media Center. What differentiates Boxee is its support for independent app development, giving all kinds of niche, mashup, and just plain cool sites a home on your TV.

There are too many to try and name or catalog here in total, but in my own house, the Facebook and Flickr photo apps have become a relaxing way of keeping up on what friends are up to. Failblog and The Daily Kitten's apps provide shamelessly effective quick-hit entertainment, and I watched the entirety of The Guild's third season through Boxee on my TV. If I'm blogging from the living room, I can have Pandora piped through our speakers, or listen to NPR through its own app, or through the RadioTime tuner. As Boxee becomes more available and accessible to the average home, more apps are bound to come along.

And your friends, too, who get hooked up with Boxee will make the experience more enjoyable. Not that I don't think the Boxee team lacks for cultural cachet, but they're the only people, out of the 10 I'm friended to through Boxee, that manage to push anything into my recommended/rated feed. When more of your friends and fellow media lovers start using it, you're bound to enjoy bumping into little surprises on Boxee a whole lot more.

What's still missing

So Boxee's taken a big step toward making their software more content-focused and accessible, but they could go farther.

• Hulu can remember where you left off in a video while you're signed in, and it would be great if Boxee could do that, too—on any video site. This isn't some overnight JavaScript hack, but, still, it's one of the last big differences between your DVD/Blu-Ray player and web video.
• Video files that we download from around the internet have a huge variety of naming schemes. Jason's detailed some techniques for helping the "scraper" in XBMC, and Boxee, recognize and organize your files in his guide to turbo-charging your XBMC installation, but more work on getting Boxee's local file organizer to instantly locate and categorize TV shows and movies is always appreciated.
• Boxee still includes an automatic torrent downloader, and a web-server-based remote control scheme, but they're both tucked away deep in the system options. Why not come out of the server room ghetto and make Boxee a remote-controlled BitTorrent champion, just like uTorrent?

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