![boxee mediacenter boxee mediacenter](https://tweakers.net/i/i0K4BNSWIe0goho29tP7ARn_9Jc=/fit-in/1280x/filters:fill(white)/i/1282126889.jpeg)
I haven’t tried Boxee on AppleTV though, which may well be the answer, but the hacky nature of it put me off.
#Boxee mediacenter mac#
However, I’ve come to realise that the problem for me isn’t ‘Boxee or Plex’, it’s that controlling a Mac Mini remotely can be a pain in the arse. In fact, Boxee instills feelings of love and devotion in me for it’s online services, recommendations and layout. Not a big deal on your laptop, but when you’re trying to control a Mac Mini with a little remote, it’s going to require clever scripts and patience.ĭespite stability and iTunes library niggles, I prefer Boxee over Plex. You would then have to disable that in order to watch BBC iPlayer, which I’m more likely to watch. Ultimately, Boxee is geared up for the US market - Hulu, ABC, Netflix and such, some of which can be accessed in the UK via VPN trickery. As mentioned above, it did cause crashes for me, but your mileage may vary.
#Boxee mediacenter tv#
Oddly, it places it in Videos > Internet, rather than TV Shows. The snappily title XBMCEyeTVParser will allow you to watch EyeTV recordings in Boxee.* To stream from your Mac, you can set up an SMB share, which will then show up as a media source in Boxee: * If you have problems (like I did) getting TV Shows to show up in the TV Show menu, editing the filename does the trick, but obviously that’s a bit tedious. * You can also get a Front Row appliance to put a Boxee entry into the Front Row Menu, making it easy to launch with the Apple Remote While playing with Boxee, I found a few useful tricks and add-ons, such as: It just means it’s not that usable for me at the moment. It feels churlish mentioning this when Boxee is in Alpha, and if you follow Team Boxee on their blog and twitter, you’ll know it’s progressing at a good pace. When it crashes on the Mac Mini the only solution is turn it off and restart it. I asked it to look for a SMB share and it crashed. I installed the EyeTV plugin from XBMC and it crashed.
#Boxee mediacenter movie#
In the middle of watching a movie with the family it crashed. Until then, I have to browse the folder structure to find what I want to play. That doesn’t explain why random songs are missing from albums though. After digging around on forums, this seemed to be caused by scraping Last.fm for information, and that a different source was intended for future releases. There are only two downsides I’ve experienced so far: Firstly, it doesn’t show all of my Music (around 800 non-DRM albums are just missing), despite leaving it overnight to process the collection. In particular, the one that interests me the most, is that the latest release supports BBC iPlayer, and does it rather well, using the Beeb’s Big Screen Interface : The social network side is intriguing, but the integration of internet services (too numerous to mention) is it’s forté. Here is your new content - go straight to it. For example, when you log in, the home screen shows you not only what you and your friends have been watching/listening to, but what you’ve recently added. That’s where Boxee comes in.īoxee, on the face of it, doesn’t have quite as much UI sexiness as Plex, but I think it’s more thoughtfully laid out. What I miss from Plex are services like BBC iPlayer and EyeTV integration, which I believe are planned. In particular iTunes library scanning works really well, and plays iTunes store DRM’s material, an area where Boxee failed (see below). The main appeal of Plex is that it’s built for OS X only, so you’re getting the best integration - no pandering to cross platform needs. The Secret Show recordings were believed to be ‘Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show’, and this couldn’t be manually removed. It doesn’t always get the show/movie right however. The slick interface has more character than Front Row though, particularly in it’s use of online databases to provide metadata and large format photographs: At the moment, the answer is that Plex doesn’t yet offer me much over just using Front Row. Plex has a very slick interface, and everytime I mention Boxee, there is the inevitable "Why not Plex?’ cry from other Mac users. Both are media center applications based on the popular open source XBox Media Center (XBMC), with Boxee focussing on the social network slant, and Plex solely on OS X integration. My journey to find the ideal Media Centre has brought me via Plex and Boxee.