I finally got a chance to play around with Boxee on my desktop which is running on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. Boxee is an entertainment aggregator which can play Netflix, Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr. In addition, it can also play local movies, music and photos.
The interface is slick and intuitive. It’s based on an easy to use menu system that can be learned easily. I was able to watch Netflix, Prison Break and a couple of other movies in a drop of a hat. It takes a little getting use to for someone to get a feel how the software works, but after a couple of minutes, you can get a couple of TV shows playing on your computer.
There are a lot of content out there, but my only beef is that the list of shows is not comprehensive enough. But, that’s not the fault of Boxee which merely works as an entertainment aggregator. Boxee runs on the Apple’s Mac, Apple TV and Linux machines. Surprisingly, it doesn’t run on Windows, but it will soon.
A Yahoo article lead me to Boxee. Here’s some details of the article worth mentioning:
Boxee will play the music and movies you have on your own hard drive. But it will also play content from services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Shoutcast, Last.fm, Flickr, Picasa, CNN and lots more. It’ll pull in video podcasts and if you want a podcast Boxee doesn’t offer, you simply add the URL of the feed.
You access all this content through an attractive and fairly intuitive interface designed for being navigated with a remote from the couch.
The last part of the package could turn out to be the most powerful. You can share what you’re watching with other Boxee users and they can share their viewing habits – and recommendations – with you. As more and more video and music becomes freely available on the Web, those kinds of recommendations from people you trust could become a great way to find the best of the avalanche of content.
Give Boxee a try. If you are a Windows user, you may have to wait a few more weeks unless you try and install Ubuntu for free now.
Have you tried this yourself? Boxee failed to start up on my 8.04 system.
xxiao,
yes, i’ve tried it. it works for me. i was able to watch netflix videos, hulu, etc. no problems here.
Wait… you got netflix videos on boxee on ubuntu? Even though the boxee people say it’ll probably be a whole year before they can get netflix on ubuntu? I call shens.
I’ve not been able to get it running on ubuntu either, although I do see the launch icon. Installing moonlight (not a package dependency, but mentioned somewhere as a possible requirement for netflix) did not help.
I like Boxee for its social networking tools which is a first and unique in its own way. I loved the “Recommend” option you have in boxee, which helps those in your friend’s list to be able to see your likes and vice versa. One word to describe Boxee, COOL ;-). Another nice blog on boxee in ubuntu.
http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/196/boxee-will-blow-you-away
Social networking… you mean sending your friends stupid advertisements? Though the twitter part is pretty neat 🙂 Less work for me whoohoo!
i dont kno about this but i installed boxee on my UBUNTU Lucid it s working perfectly fine tho only thing is i cant find the netflix app…
i already authorized netflix to be integrated on my boxee acct. but still not finding any netflix on my boxee
You won’t get NetFlix on any Linux distro even with Boxee ui. The content providers will only use the Windows DRM to protect their content. Windows won’t allow their DRM to run on freely distributed operating systems.