Boxee
Movies, TV Shows and Video from the Internet on your TV.
Boxee is Media Center on steroids. It runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux Ubuntu and Mac OS X and it can handle pretty much any DRM-free file format you throw at it. It’s happy with local, networked and streaming media, and you can expand it via plug-ins that deliver anything from iPlayer to game reviews. If it puts video online, you can add it to Boxee.
Boxee has a 10-foot interface, which is a fancy way of saying it’s designed to work when it’s on your TV and you’re on the sofa. It’s as comfortable with a keyboard and mouse as it is with a remote control.
The interface has been given a major tidy up: navigation is simple and logical, everything looks great and the user experience is consistent. Boxee doesn’t evade geolocation, but it does sit back and whistle while you bypass it: simply find a suitable proxy server online and plug the details into the software and it will cheerfully tell media services you’re in places you aren’t.
It’s not foolproof, however: as non- US fans of the media site Hulu know all too well, some sites do more than check your IP address before letting you stream content.
Where Boxee excels is in the way it brings all your disparate media sources together. It doesn’t care where media comes from, so you can create a media queue that moves from a downloaded TV programme to a YouTube stream.
