Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Interested in trying out Boxee? Then email me and I’ll drop you an invite to Boxee. I figured that I might as well let the folks who drift onto this blog check it out as I’ve been writing about it for ExtremeTech and doing a few blog entries here about it.

So if you’re interested in trying Boxee, drop me an email. If you post it in the comments I’ll also try to get you one but don’t blame me if your email address gets sucked up by some sleazy spammer. Okay?

Please note that I may not be able to respond via email to each email I get. But I will be sending out the invitations until they run out (I don’t know if they do but maybe there’s a limit I don’t know about).

If you are still one of the folks that don’t know what Boxee is then here’s some background information about it:

Boxee media center software is being developed by a startup company. Boxee supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through its Python plugin system, Boxee includes features such as YouTube and Apple movie trailer support, SHOUTcast, and Podcast streaming, as well as online picture viewing of such services such as Flickr and Picasa.

Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p, however as Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding it is placing the entire load of the video decoding process on the system’s CPU which means that users need by today’s standards a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with the H.264 codec.

Boxee source code is based upon XBMC which it uses as its framework, and the Boxee developers contribute source code back upstream to the XBMC project[15][16]. Boxee is distributed under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by Boxee licensed under the LGPL). Boxee’s social networking layer library, libboxee, is however closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee’s online back-end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase.

Boxee running on my Samsung HDTV.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...