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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.
To clarify, you can absolutely run 32-bit Boxee on a 64-bit version of Windows, so it technically supports 64-bit Windows Vista and 7. They just don't provide a native 64-bit version of Boxee.
Abstraction layers.
Nope, not Linux.
Nope, it's just not available to Linux at large. It's not open source. You can download an Ubuntu .deb of the binaries, but if you want to run it another distribution? Sorry, Charlie.
Previously the web site had a great intro video that actually explained it fairly well. I'm not quite sure when that was changed, but since I've been running the alpha for roughly a year now, I can try taking a stab at it.
Boxee's goal is to be a "social media player" where you can watch media from various sources, see what your friends are watching, and let your friends know what you're watching. By "media" it's referring to TV, movies, music, and pictures. The source of most of the content comes from the Internet (although it definitely supports offline and local network content). Boxee provides a framework to create native applications that allow aggregating and viewing of the online media (basically XBMC plugins if you're familiar with that app), for example there's apps for Hulu, Pandora, Flickr, etc. Boxee automatically monitors what you and your friends watch, and allows you to browse the history of it as well. Boxee also offers other cool features like grabbing metadata for local content. E.g. if it detects a ripped copy of Season 1 of The Office, it will grab screen shots and descriptions of each episode from IMDB.
Personally I've found Boxee's primary benefit is for aggregating media. With the new version, I can search a TV show title and it comes up with all the episodes I can stream regardless of the source (e.g. episodes from Hulu, nbc.com, etc.). I'm not a big fan of the social aspect, but it's not a deal breaker (I just ignore it). So far I've been very impressed with both the alpha and beta releases and would definitely recommend giving the software a go.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.