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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.
VLC has long supported various output APIs, mostly because on different platforms, different APIs have varying levels of driver support and varying performance. I imagine this is similar.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Abstraction layers.
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.
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???
Neither do I, how is going from OpenGL to DirectX an "upgrade" either?
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.
No Linux Netflix Streaming. Binary Deb Package. Lame.
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.