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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."
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.
Neither do I, how is going from OpenGL to DirectX an "upgrade" either?
oh... just saw the comment below about DRM specifically whacking unsupported clients. didn't realize it wasn't just a compatibility issue. What would it take to get the Moonlight developers to contact/work with the Netflix developers on that point? (i'm guessing a miracle)
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 guess I don't see what the thrill is, exactly. If it's main function is to provide a single interface to 'channels', and I would still have to suffer through endless credit card commercials, then...sigh. Thanks for the input though.
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.