Analogism

The Boxee application is a software application that runs on Mac and Linux, and will also run on Windows machines in a near future. Boxee is a Media Center type app that allows you to browse your local media, as well as network distributed folders and internet streaming media. You can manually add network sources and they will become available under say “Videos” tab if you have video files. But you can also browse per resource, more Finder or Explorer style if you will, to find media in a certain folder or drive.

The internet streaming feature is a cool feature that makes use of PodCast type XML files, the same way iTunes does with PodCasts, and you can watch any stream without having to subscribe to any of them. They’re just there. Although this is a way to simplify things, I can definitely see some issues in the horizon if people start adding their sources to this, as it’s all Open Source. The library can probably grow significantly pretty fast, making it hard to browse. Just like I feel it’s hard to browse my media library using the “Videos” or “Music” tabs. I have to much media available, so it’s better to go via Resources and go straight to whatever resource I’m looking for.

Boxee is in private Alpha testing mode right now, but it’s running surprisingly well for an Alpha app. Although that’s what the software development scene has turned into. A Beta release is more of a 95% functioning application nowadays than a buggy pre-release of the app. Some of the navigation confuses me and is a bit unintuitive, but I suppose one will learn in time by doing, or it might even change. There is an updated version out in a matter of hours of typing this, and I’m no doubt gonna check out that updated version and post any fixes and updates worth mentioning.

The start screen gives you information about what media has been recently used in your account. You can log in with different users, so it’s all personal. It also shows you a stream of recommended media, what your friends are watching and what has been recently added for your within your system or network resources at your disposal. You have your own account where you can add friends as a social network, where you can recommend media and see what others recommends and are watching, if they (and you) choose to share that information. You can also use your last.fm account to listen to music, and share what you are listening to, but my experience with the last.fm plugin is very buggy with failing to retrieve streams and such, but that might obviously improve.

Using the Internet Videos feature is pretty neat and works pretty well. Although the interface is pretty slow and laggy due to the real-time downloading of information, which also occurs when browsing the network resources to some extent. Browsing YouTube or the CNN channel works pretty well and is a really nice feature, and I’m happy they managed to implemented so well. Let’s just hope they crack a way to implement say Hulu streams into this thing. Now I just have to figure out how to get my local 24/7 news web-TV stream in this thing.

The Pictures tab can be a bit confusing. Apple’s Mac OS X is built to make everything easy for the end user. But the back end is not as simple, and when accessing your iPhoto library with Boxee, this becomes an issue. If you look at the above picture you can see the folders iPhoto creates “behind the scenes” if you will, folder that the end user doesn’t see or use normally. But now when browsing for photos, you have to choose between Auto Import, Data, Originals, Contents, Modified and iPod Photo Cache. Well, at least I do. However, you can choose to browse any folder if you have them stored in an orderly fashion under say Pictures folder on yous Mac, so this doesn’t have to be a confusing factor. But hopefully, this will be caught by the Boxee developers and maybe they can hide irrelevant folders by default.

Above you see the Settings screen, which is a pretty rich interface with a lot of options to play around with. I am running the app in window mode right now which is achieved by hitting the Tab key on your keyboard, but it runs natively in fullscreen mode, and it looks really good! Will I be using this instead of Front Row? Ehh. I will no doubt give this more of my time and keep playing around with it. But honestly, I’m not positive I need the whole socializing thing. Actually, for me, that’s overkill and I’d rather be without it. But overall, it does have more features I DO like than Front Row or my Xbox 360. But realistically, if I sit down in front of the TV, I’m looking to watch my media or listen to my music, so personally, I wouldn’t mind sticking with Front Row for that purpose. But that’s in my living room, in the future, when I’m done playing with this app. Well, I still love the internet streaming… Who knows!?

What I would LOVE to see, is a Spotify plugin for Boxee! How awesome wouldn’t that be? You would need to use a keyboard though, since it’s search based… But I’m sure they can make something really useful out of that! The radio feature perhaps?

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Read more at Boxee.tv, Boxee Blog, Appletell and CrunchGear