Boxee’s media player software app promises to free us all from stinky, trashy preprogrammed television by bringing web video’s hassle-free, on-demand, click-to-watch experience onto our HDTVs.
The somewhat clunky alpha release of Boxee’s software has been around since the beginning of the year, but the company took a big step forward with its public debut of the amped-up beta version in early December.
The Boxee beta, which is currently invitation-only but will be made available to all as a free download during the Consumer Electronics Show the first week of January, improves the stability and the usability of the alpha significantly.
The company will be offering a dedicated set-top box next spring, but the software — which runs on almost any computer — is almost fully cooked. I’ve been testing the new Boxee beta on an Intel Mac Mini hooked up to my HDTV for a little over a week. Windows and Linux versions are also available.
While I’m not ready to tell the cable guy to stuff it (as much as I’d love to), my evenings have been filled with hours of streaming video pulled down from literally scores of online sources. The quality ranges from watchable to spectacular.
Loads of HD options
Most importantly, the software has opened up a treasure chest of possibilities for my HDTV: cooking shows, travel shows, underwater documentaries, Ze Frank, Cool Hunting, Star Trek and all sorts of classic movies. Normally, I’d have to sit at my desk or prop open a laptop to take in this stuff. But Boxee lets me enjoy it on the big screen while sitting on my couch.
Yes, there are many methods for putting web video on your TV, but Boxee is the most elegant solution I’ve seen. For the beta release, the whole user experience has undergone a slick redesign.
The new Boxee homepage delivers a global menu where you’ll find big icons for all the important stuff — Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Music, Photos and a local file-system browser (called simply “Files”). There are also direct links to your queue, Boxee’s settings and a “Now Playing” button that immediately takes you back to your full-screen video.
Click on one of the content libraries for TV or movies in the global menu and you’ll see a huge improvement in the way Boxee organizes your available content.
The TV show library, for example, now aggregates all available shows from the web and from your local machine. Since each show is listed in the library regardless of its source, you no longer have to go into various independent apps — Comedy Central, CBS, Hulu feeds, etc. — to find the shows you want. You just get a huge list. Sort it or filter it how you’d like. I found it useful to filter out shows that require a paid subscription (like those from Netflix) so I would only see the free streams.
Movies are handled the same way. Picks from Hulu are mixed in with documentaries from other sources and the local files on your hard drive.
Boxee’s homepage hub
The libraries are deep, but all roads lead back to the Boxee homepage. It’s your hub, and there’s always something fresh waiting for you there.
The global menu takes up the whole top of the homepage. Below it, a new three-column layout shows your personal queue, a feed of content recommended by your friends (”Feed”) and a stack of programming chosen by the Boxee staff (”Recommended”).
To get the most out of the Feed column, you have to follow some other users. As with Twitter, following is a one-way proposition. Boxee makes it easy to import your contacts from other services. I quickly added a bunch of friends, but since the Boxee user base is tiny, I didn’t get the flood of awesome suggestions I was expecting. The Boxee staff seeds the Feed daily with some cool viral videos, however, so even if you don’t “do” social networking (or if your friends are stooges), the Feed is still useful. Boxee says it will soon let you add suggestions from Twitter and Facebook friends to your Feed.
The Feed column contains mostly shorter clips from YouTube, but the picks in the Recommended column tend to be longer, feature-length videos or HD eye candy like slide shows from NASA and the Big Picture blog. By clicking around both columns, you can get a taste of what all the cool kids on the web are currently into.
The queue is the best part of the beta’s redesign. As you cruise around the various libraries within Boxee, you can add to your queue any bit of content that catches your eye. Then just fire it up and let the streams flow. After each video, you’re given the option to share it with your Boxee friends or move along to the next item in the queue. Click, click, click.
There isn’t much to say about the revamped Apps area other than that it’s been redesigned to make it easier to browse the available episodes within each channel. I actually spent less time browsing the content inside the Apps now that the TV library does such a good job aggregating videos from across the whole system.
Improved video playback
Video playback also has been improved. The expanded controls are easier to use, and the software is more responsive. You can use a regular handheld remote like the Apple remote to control playback, but it’s clunky. If you have an iPhone or an Android phone, get one of the free official or third-party Boxee remote apps, which are much more responsive.
The Windows version of Boxee has moved from OpenGL to DirectX, with full hardware graphics acceleration on Nvidia Ion chips. This makes it possible to play full 1080p HD videos on relatively inexpensive PC hardware. I did my tests by hooking my Intel Mac Mini (2007 model) to an Olevia 747i with a DVI-to-HDMI cable. So even if you have an older, slower machine and a big HDTV, you can run Boxee and get an excellent picture. It may not be true HD in all cases, but it still looks great.
Some of the full-HD streams (like Heroes and House) hiccupped while they played, but when I dialed down my resolution a step to 1280×768, the stuttering stopped. Getting surround sound from the Mini involved a painless hack.
Minor problems
One of the big problems I had with Boxee’s alpha release was stability: The menus would choke often, and the app would freeze a few times a day, requiring a reboot. The beta is much more stable. It still crashes, but far less frequently (and usually without requiring a reboot).
My installation of the Boxee beta had a hard time playing discs. I went through a stack of DVD-Rs filled with .avi files, and Boxee wouldn’t load any of them. Likewise with .avi and MP4 content streamed across my wireless network. I found it easier to drag the files onto the local hard drive, where they played flawlessly. Actual DVDs played OK most of the time, but the subtitles would sometimes switch on, and Boxee wouldn’t let me turn them off. In those cases, I would have to watch the DVD in Apple’s Front Row.
But Boxee’s goal isn’t to replace your DVD player — it’s to bring a wealth of streaming web video content to your couch. And in that role, it truly excels.
Sign up to download the free beta at Boxee.tv, and expect to see it released in early 2010.
One day after officially announcing the 
