Have you ever been confused with all the hype out there with “Media Servers” or ways to view movies and tv on your computer?  Xboxes, PS3, Windows Vista Media, etc?

Of course, from Apple we have the lovely AppleTV.  It is a great device, as I have on, and I recommend it to anyone.  It will do an excellent job of playing any video that you can get into itunes, and can even rent and buy movies and TV shows directly from the device.

Well what if you don’t want to pay for your TV shows and just want to watch them the way they view on regular TV with some commercials?  What if you have some video formats that are a type the AppleTV cannot play without converting (and loosing some quality in the process)  Boxee is a media player for your Mac that can solve many of these problems.  What I have noticed so far is the ability to play many different TV shows from CBS, ABC, WB, etc that they allow for streaming over the web – for free of course.  You can also play your Netflix instant viewable titles through it. You can also play youtube and other common online videos.  Of course you can also play pretty much any type of video file you may have on your hard drive including RIPed DVD’s.  But where this can really excel is if you have a Mac Mini – you can hook it up to an LCD screen and make it a media player and watch these things on a big screen.  Plus, boxee will even allow itself to be controlled by the apple remote, so it makes it that much more desirable to sit back and control.

Boxee can also be installed directly on an AppleTV to give it some extra features such as the TV show viewing.   It is in an “Alpha” state right now which means it still has to be worked on a bit before it is ready for prime time, but I have found most of it to be very stable.  They have a closed invite system right now, so if any of you want to check it out let me know.  Kingsley Macintosh Consulting can help you install this and set it up if you would like and we already have some clients that are getting ready to try it out.

Check it out at:

http://www.boxee.tv/

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.