End User: CES 2009: Boxee Opens Its Lid with Public Alpha

CES 2009: Boxee Opens Its Lid with Public Alpha

by Aric Annear on January 08, 2009

Boxee, the media center software frontend for Mac and Linux, has now been opened to a public alpha.

Even as an alpha it's surprisingly stable and feature rich. Like most media centers, Boxee will catalog your music and movies and present them in an easily navigable menu controllable with the Apple Remote. But besides that, its open web API allows a ton of integrated websites, social media, and file sharing services. You can watch TV and movies on Hulu.com, listen to last.fm Internet radio, Joost, Myspace, Comedy Central, MTV Music, and much, much more. Boxee is completely free and open-source, so you can add your own services and set up your own integration between Boxee and the websites and feeds you use most. There's a native Bittorrent application, so you have access to public (and legal) videos such as TEDTalks, as well as scheduling your own torrents.

There's also a social media aspect to it, in that you can invite fellow Boxee users to share their music and video playlists, which acts as a recommendation engine.

Being an alpha, it has a couple of limitations. First, it hasn't been ported to Windows, so you'll need OS X or Linux to play. (There's a pre-alpha port for Windows, but that's invite-only for now.) Second, some streams from sites like CBS, Myspace, and Comedy Central have no pause or navigation functions yet. Also, Netflix can integrate with Boxee, but only if you're using a full-fledged Mac--AppleTV and Linux won't load it. Of course, being an alpha at all means not everything will work all the time, though the version I saw seemed stable and perfectly usable. All the existing known issues should be addressed by the beta, which is due in April.

You can get Boxee here.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.