Boxee! (1 Viewer)

[rdvon]

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with this media center fork of XBMC, for those of you who aren't familiar here's a link to the site: boxee: the open, connected, social media center for mac os x and linux
Now that everyone is up to speed, do you think a program which is focused primarily on online media will ever succeed as a viable alternative to other media center programs such as mediaportal?

On a slightly irrelevant note, when will XBMC get tv tuner support!?

 

[ep0n]

BOXEE, I like it because it has HULU.COM support. Thats what MediaPortal needs.

 

[pilehave]

Now that everyone is up to speed, do you think a program which is focused primarily on online media will ever succeed as a viable alternative to other media center programs such as mediaportal?

No...the missing TV-part of XBMC was the one thing that made me scrap that application, and with the whole local movie/series part gone too, and only online videos, I don't think that Boxee will stay afloat for more than a couple of months.

Edit: with BluRay on the market and downloadable MKV's in FullHD, I couldn't imagine myselft watching some terrible webstream on my 42" TV. That would just suck!

 

[Slurm]

A good combination of online and offline content is the best way!

I like such plugins like myyoutube, mtv-videos or relictv. I know that the picture quality isn't that good, but that's no problem when watching just for fun or information.

And when I like to sit down and watch a movie or series in good quality I can do that too.

 

[Nuisance]

I've been playing around with boxee. And yes they really have their online content sorted. A relatively slick interface and easy functionality.

But for local media isn't that great. It groups all music artists together so if you have a more than a few artists then gettting from a to z is painful.

Their TV series support isn't too hot either, I had Band of brothers which it identified as a single film even though there were all 12ish episodes there and there was no way to access each individual episode. There is a function to say that the system got it wrong and to correctly label it but it didn't work.

I've also been playing around with a number of osx media centers; frontrow, plex, mediacenter and some more. Mediaportal is about 5 years infront of any of these guys.

All I can say is we're lucky to have MP and you don't know it until you go out looking for a replacement...

 

[citizenkeys]

boxee has no public windows support.
that's why i just gave up on it.
linux is too complicated for most consumers (the mediacenter market).
and the expense of a mac is just too much for most consumers to use a mac as a dedicated mediacenter.

i used xbmc since it first came out as xbmp (xbox media player) for xbox with modchip.
for pc, xbmc is best for mediacenter and mediaportal is best if you need xbmc with tv tuner support.

 

[winterescape]

BOXEE, I like it because it has HULU.COM support. Thats what MediaPortal needs.

you can launch Hulu desktop from MP, I have been using it for a while and got it working with the Hauppauge remote... see this thread....
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mediaportal-plugins-47/hulu-desktop-60585/

 

[peely]

linux is too complicated for most consumers (the mediacenter market).

XBMC has a live cd installer now, effctively you can burn to CD and install a booting Media Center with little or no Linux knowledge. Very neat.

for pc, xbmc is best for mediacenter and mediaportal is best if you need xbmc with tv tuner support.

There's been a project running in XBMC for a "Unified PVR" providing TVGuide, Recording management and Live TV standardised interfaces to any backend anyone cares to develop into. I think their first implementation will be based on MythTV but there's no reason a Media Portal interface can't be implemented.

Once the Unified PVR leaves SVN, XBMC gets much more interesting.