Boxee was demoed at UDS with the hopes of getting it into the main Ubuntu repositories, and I say rock on!
It’s an amazingly polished home media center running Linux that allows you to stream media from the internet, play your own music, videos, view your photos and record TV shows.
Best of all, it’s free and you can download it and install it for Ubuntu now by simply visiting their site and choosing what architecture you’d like.
Features
- Wide format support – handles almost all non-DRM formats
- Social networking integration – update your friends and share what you like
- Multiple format sources – internet, hard drive, DVDs, network share
- Built-in bittorrent client
- View your photos too
- Remote control support – optimized for your TV
- Skinnable
- Add on apps and widgets
I tried it out and installed it on my laptop a couple of weeks ago after the UDS session. It’s very cool, but unfortunately didn’t work too well with my open source radeon video card driver – the framerate wasn’t particularly fast. I’ve yet to try it with the proprietary drivers, because I like my pretty boot screen.
It’s definitely good enough for a dedicated computer and if you’re looking for a home media system, I would look no further than Boxee. With the right hardware, it would run perfectly.
In the next 6 months to a year I think I’ll purchase myself a sweet little home media center computer with HDMI out and hook it up to a nice TV, then stick Boxee on it. It will be awesome.
Check out this video for an overview: