Boxee is XBMC-based media centre software currently in private alpha, currently only available for OS X Leopard(Intel Macs only) and Linux, although a Windows release is in development.

Boxee is a social networking orientated media centre, allowing you to make recommendations to friends and allowing your friends to make recommendations to you. In addition, it has several features such as on-the-fly grabbing of subtitles, album art, descriptions and the ability to play streaming media from YouTube, last.fm etc.

It also has an automatic indexer, which can scan both local and networked storage, and an integrated DVD player. Mac users can also utilise their Apple Remote to control Boxee.

Overall, it seems like a pretty complete solution. I do have a few concerns regarding its ease of use. For example, you can’t use your mouse inside the application and you have to change settings inside its interface (there isn’t a nice separate options window, which would in my opinion be much more convenient). The automatic grabbing of descriptions/album art is a bit weak too, for some reason Boxee decided to identify the 1950s classic ‘Det Sjunde inseglet’ as ‘Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs’, despite the fact that is still in production!

Boxee will be a nice media centre should you need one, but the lack of support for TV tuners puts me off using it in my media centre PC. I think it’s definitely an improvement on Front Row, and the social aspect will add another dimension to it but is currently a little useless as very few people use it.

Update: Andrew Kippen responded to that review (Press and Relations Manager)

After reading your article and hearing the comments of a few others this past week, it’s become clear that the lack of mouse support needs to be explained.

boxee brings a TV-like interface to digital media (on a PC or connected-TV). We built boxee to work with a remote (for simplicity) or keyboard (for functionality), and we’ve purposely avoided the mouse. While we’re all accustomed to using a mouse when we’re at the computer, directional keys or buttons make for an experience that translates much better onto the big screen.

Additionally PVR and TV Tuners are definitely on the road map (that was one of the major take-aways from the XBMC developer’s conference we hosted in Amsterdam back in June). We feel like most of the TV shows people watch will be streaming from the Internet soon so live TV and PVRs won’t matter as much in the future. However, we know it’s a large part of current media centers so we’re working to incorporate it into boxee.

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Mike did call Sony electronics who told him to call Sony Pictures which he did. The tech on the line told Mike that this was happening because of a new copy protection that Sony was using on those movies and that they would not change the way the copy protection worked. A firmware update would correct this situation and make the DVDs playable in his player. When he asked about the update he was told that it was not available yet and that it could take two to four weeks before it would be available.

Great story, is not it ? I really love the way the Sony tech reacted to Mikes question. Very professional to tell him that an firmware update would help but that it is not available now. Great help for someone who wanted to play legit DVDs on a DVD player. Why is it the case that only customers who buy DVDs and CDs are often having troubles playing them ?

I suppose there is only one solution to the problem. Avoid Sony at all cost, they had so many ****ups in the past years that I’m really wondering why they are still in the business at all.

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This is not really an alternative if you ask me and a better easier way is to hack the DVD player and enable region free mode which plays DVDs from all regions of this world. You probably think that this is a complicated process which requires knowledge and time – it is not. Region free mode can be enabled on most DVD players by simply using the remote to enter a certain code that enabled the region free mode.

Sounds probably to good to be true, what do you think ? All you need to do is go to the videohelp website and search their database that contains hacks for almost 5000 DVD players. I can’t guarantee that your DVD player is among the 5000 listed but the chance is pretty good. Want an example to see how easy it is ?

I just picked one random DVD player from Samsung with the modell number DVD-HD870.

• turn on dvd player
• make sure there’s no dvd in closed tray
• press ‘repeat’ button
• ‘no disc’ disappears in left corner
• press 29334 if you have a R1 player
• 57538 if you have a R2 player
• 56732 if you have a R3 player
• 76884 if you have a R4 player
• 53814 if you have a R5 player
• 24462 if you have a R6 player
• current region code is visible in left corner
• press 9 for code free
• press ‘Standby’
• enjoy!!

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