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Boxee Opens Beta To All
DeviceGuru writes "Boxee has quietly moved its long-awaited Beta release onto its public download site, reports OpenBoxeeBox.com. The new version of this free Internet- and local- A/V streaming player currently supports PCs running Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu OSes, with an Apple TV version coming soon. Key enhancements include a vastly redesigned homescreen and new global menu, which collectively make it much quicker to locate content, an improved search function that now treats online and local media equivalently, so you can locate and play movie or TV show titles much faster, plus — at long last — a fully functional Netflix instant-downloads player appears in the Windows version (but not in the Linux version). Also of significance is that Boxee's graphical engine has migrated from from OpenGL to DirectX, allowing it to take advantage of Direct X video acceleration. The free public Boxee Beta A/V player software is available on Boxee's website."
It supports not only Windows XP, but Vista and 7, but only 32-bit versions.
In contrast it supports Ubuntu 64-bit.
New Economic Perspectives
When the fuck will either Netflix move away from Silverlight or Moonlight support the Netflix player? This is currently my single biggest gripe on Linux by far.
So they're moving to DirectX, but they're also running on Mac and Linux? I don't get it.
This wouldn't work on fedora 12?
I mean, the kernels are Linux - period. So, I'm not getting why the specification of Ubuntu here.
I really hope the new interface is based on Boxxy.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Sup dawg, I heard you like 4chan so we put a Boxxy on your Boxee so you can troll while you troll.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'm glad to see they've finally started offering a native 64 bit version for Linux. Previously, I had been providing patches/scripts to allow folks to compile it themselves on their forums (I'm a moderator on their Linux forum). There's currently a RPM on the Linux forum for Fedora 12, but as I don't run Fedora any more, I can't vouch for it. I have personally compiled the latest Beta on Gentoo ~amd64 and it works fine with some minor tweaks (I plan to submit an ebuild to Gentoo Bug 258082). One thing to note if you do compile from source is that their XULRunner included in the flashplayer portion of their source is missing 64 bit shared objects (this causes flash to break). I've submitted a bug to get the XULRunner updated, but haven't heard anything.
I've ran the closed Beta for the last month and so far it's very promising. I just wish Boxee's development process was more open.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
"Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu OSes"
Not Linux? :)
So now Ubuntu is to Linux what Kleenex is to tissue?
GNU/Ubuntu sounds weird though.
This is amazing, fantastic news! I'm overjoyed! Boxee is our queen! :-)
I have zilch experience with boxee but did spend some time on it's site a couple of weeks ago to see if it might be of utility when viewing tv shows or movies online. For the life of me I could not figure out what its supposed to do 'for me'. The boxee website is a great example of what happens when they people involved are so deeply entrenched in whatever realm boxee is that they have no clue how to communicate to 'regular' people.
A site like hulu is easy to figure out. But it's got too many commercials and they seem to be adding more all the time. Boxee...someone tell me what it's good for? Like you were explaining to someone who didn't know already???
I've been a faithful user of Boxee for the past year, but the Beta convinced me to go back to XBMC.
Problems I had with Boxee: :) The packages overwrote files that I had changed to get everything working.
1) Didn't expose all features of XBMC, such as Synch Display Refresh Rate to Media. I've got a TV that can do 24hz, 50hz,60hz, etc, why should I see pull down artifacts? I also wanted the Skip Direct to Menu option for DVD playback.
2) Boxee hasn't fixed problems from the Alpha - I've got some ISO rips which still fail to playback in Boxee. XBMC and VLC have no problems with them. This was a _huge_ WAF issue. She had gone back to pulling the DVDs out of storage to watch them!
3) The Social Media aspect was pointless. None of my friends were using Boxee, and aren't likely to. It was pure clutter between me and my media. Note: You can't unsubscribe from Avner's feed!
4) Not being able to watch videos, or listen to music until it had finished scanning my collection. I have 4TB of media, don't make me wait.
5) When I upgraded to the Beta, my remote control stopped working.
6) Their releases are a long time apart.
7) Even when I submitted a patch for a bug, it didn't make it into the Beta.
The only thing I seem to be giving up is Hulu support, which if it really annoys me, I can port back into XBMC.
I wish them luck, the Boxee box announced at CES looks pretty cool, and the $200 price point is pretty compelling. It's just not for me.
Apparently not.
It takes a lot more than a kernel to install and run a program, which list grows only longer and more complex the more complicated the program is, and they're all different from distro to distro. For one thing, they're only offering a .deb file--there's no RPM. I wouldn't be surprised if dependency hell made it a major hackery job just to get it up and running in Debian, let alone a distro as different as Fedora.
I'm hoping for better proxy / VPN support. I pay for a web proxy and a VPN to England so I can watch BBC, channel 4, etc from the USA. The previous Boxee didn't handle the connection (with password authentication) well. Frankly it was full of fail. I am on the cusp of dumping cable and little things like a better boxee will get me there.
Sheldon
The most intriguing part about boxee is the box by d-link... Such an awesome case. I've never used Boxee, but have used XBMC(What Boxee is based on)... I wonder how easy it would be to install XBMC-Live on it :)
I've been thinking about trying one of the $200 Acer Revo boxes (Atom+ION) with either Boxee or XBMC. Anyone have any opinion on that combo? It would be kinda like the Boxee box, except available now & if you want to repurpose it down the road you have a nice little machine...
There's actually a RPM in the Linux forums(which I moderate) for Fedora 12, and compiling it yourself isn't too complex. You need a lot of the -devel packages, but if you take a look at the RPM's spec, that should give you a good idea of what you need.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Where did you get the sources? It's not on their download site. Wikipedia said Boxee included propriety code, so I thought you couldn't get it. However, if you can get the source, that's a different story, of course.
I just installed it on my Karmic netbook, and I have to say it really rocks!
God I hate 4chan kids. Get off my lawn.
Assuming I don't need any HD content, what sort of hardware would I need to run Boxee? I have an old P3 I'm currently using to view videos, play music, etc. It works great, but I'd like a more task appropriate UI than XFCE. Is Boxee likely to run OK? I can imagine the database back end might take a bit of power to run smoothly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No Linux Netflix Streaming. Binary Deb Package. Lame.
do you have to register to use this if you don't care about or don't want the "social networking" crap?
You're running Fedora. Take charge of the situation.
Crack the DEB open and take a look at the boxee binary and see what it links to.
There's a good chance that everything it needs is already installed on your system.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The reporting on this has been extremely bad. This all has to doing video decoding in hardware. DirectX has APIs for that, and they are now being used in the Windows version. The Linux version continues to use the relevant Xorg extensions (XvMC?) for video decoding.
So they mean that DirectX is now available for MacOSX and Ubuntu? I didn't know that.
Good move since OpenGL didn't provide any acceleration.
morons...
And I did it because I just didn't have time to dick around with it any longer. I got a Macbook, and finally found a Unix that didn't require constant tinkering.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I'm finding I liked the alpha better. One of my biggest gripes is that I can no longer tell boxee that the IMDB movie info its associated one of my files with isn't correct. In the alpha, there was a choice in the info screen of the file to say "Thats not the right info" whereupon I could choose again what movie it really was. Now I can't do that. In fact, I'm not sure what I need to do in that situation, and boxee has mislabled dozens of my files.
Does this have much value outside of the US? Here in UK our legit internet sources of actual TV and movies is quite limited and I see no sign of support for iPlayer, 4oD or Demand5.
And for those who don't know, all you need to 'crack open' a DEB are the standard systems tools, ar and tar. No obscure, opaque binary headers to be stripped off with cryptic, overspecialized tools like rpm2cpio, and no need for bizarre, nearly obsolete tools like cpio. DEB just works, unlike that RPM crap! :)
(Note, I work with both package formats daily, and have never actually had a problem with either one, but it really does seem like the RPM dev team made some weird-ass decisions back in the day.)
I run XP in a Sun Virtual box. Do you think I will be able to do netflix through that?
Also I wonder if the netflix engine is going to be any better or worse than using the Silverlight viewer that netflix offers. My main problem with the latter is that it has such shallow buffer that the playback often stops. I'd like to find a viewer with a deep buffer even if I had to wait 15 minutes for the movie to commence playing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You don't need to source to figure out what libraries are needed, the RPM's .spec file will give that to you.
-Bucky
It just crashes for me.
The "Boxee" tries to load itself...takes 20 seconds or so...and then it just vanishes...just like a crashy piece of software that doesn't work...same way.
Nivida drivers and OpenGL are working, because I run Blender (opengl) on it...and opengl games + wine...
So for now...beta is indeed beta.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
no no no, it's "GNUbuntu"
Boxee is based on XMBC, so whatever XMBC supports should also be supported by Boxee. I haven't had to download anything yet, but I've just used Boxee as a front-end to my iTunes library, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Sounds like big brother phoning home. No thanks. "But its a social" - NO. Make a player or a chat client, not both.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The gnome archive manager can also open DEB files just like a tarball...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
DEB just works, unlike that RPM crap! :)
Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane, to back in the days when I used RPM-distro's, and wondered at the smugness of those DEB users with their cryptic 'apt' commands and, what seemed most baffling, no Dependency Hell issues...
Then one day (OK, one 2-or-3-days, and a lot of floppies, and command line hoodoo, and researching BBS forums to get everything working...) I tried it myself, and, well, they were right - once you go DEB, you never go back. ;)
Even now, 10+ years later, I still shy away from using RPM-based distro's. :D
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
See my comment above http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1507704&cid=30752620