Boxee: Difference between revisions

Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions^[2][3][4][5]. Marketed as the first ever "'Social Media Center", Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger)^[6], Apple TV^[7], and Linux^[8] for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008^[9]. A Microsoft Windows Alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.

Boxee said in 2009^[10] it is planning to release its own dedicated set-top box (hardware) for Boxee, and also plans to license its Boxee media center and social networking service as a third-party software component to other companies for them to use the Boxee software in their hardware, such as set-top boxes from cable-TV companies or embedded computers built-in directly into television-sets^{[11][12][13][14]}. Boxee has also stated that their goal is to have Boxee run on as many third-party hardware platforms and operating systems as possible^[15].

Boxee media center software is being developed by a startup company. Boxee supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through its Python plugin system, Boxee includes incorporated addon features such as Apple movie trailer support and subtitle downloading, as well as online internet content channels and services, like BBC iPlayer, Jamendo, Joost, Last.fm, NPR, SHOUTcast internet audio plugins, and movie trailers of apple.com, ABC, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV Music (music videos)^[16], MySpaceTV, Netflix^[17], Revision3, YouTube, Warner Bros Television Network^[18] internet video plugins, and Flickr and PicasaWeb picture viewing plugins. All are available as media sources available alongside your local library. Some of these are specialized connections to services (e.g., YouTube), while the rest are a preselected list of Podcast channels for streaming using generic RSS web feeds (e.g., BBC News). Boxee had supported NBC Universal's Hulu, but was asked by Hulu to remove the service.^[19] However, Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulu's RSS feeds ^[20], which also prevented Boxee being blocked by Hulu.

Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p. However, as Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding, the entire load of the video decoding process is handled by the system's CPU which means that users need, by today's standards, a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with a modern video codec like H.264.

Boxee source code is based on the XBMC Media Center project's code, and the Boxee developers contribute source code back upstream to the XBMC project^[21][22]. Boxee is distributed under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by Boxee licensed under the LGPL). Boxee's social networking layer library, libboxee, is however closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee's online back-end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase.

Boxee also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there are also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. Through Boxee's Python plugin system it is also possible for end-users to add unofficial third-party plugins to enable Torrent downloads from sites such as thepiratebay.org.

The social networking component of Boxee is its major differentiator from other media center software, in several ways, as follows.

Boxee requires registered user accounts, which form a social network of fellow Boxee users. Users can follow the activity of other Boxee users who were added as friends, and can publicly rate and recommend content. Users can also control what media appear in the activity feed in order to maintain privacy. If a user recommends something that is freely available from an internet content service then Boxee will let others users stream it directly. If a user recommends something that is not freely available then Boxee will try to show metadata, and trailers if it is a movie.

Boxee can export a user's media activity feed to other social networking services such as FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr. The list of supported sites is small, and this feature is one-way, (it is not yet possible to monitor Twitter feeds from within Boxee), but this type of third-party integration is different from the way content sources as treated. Through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr it is then possible for a user to choose to post the Boxee activity feed to social networking sites such as Facebook, (currently through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr apps for Facebook). The user's friends' Boxee activity feeds are displayed on the user's home screen, as is the user's own recent activity. Internet content is accessed through a sub-menu of each of the video, audio, and photo menu items, such as Video -> "My videos" and Video -> "Internet videos."

Boxee can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the system's DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), or UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) shares. Boxee is designed to take advantage of the system's network port if broadband Internet connection if available, using the IMDb to obtain meta data information, thumbnails, and reviews on movies, TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via FreeDB) for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Boxee can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Boxee can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.

Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats. It can decode these in software and optionally pass-through AC3/DTS audio from movies directly to S/PDIF output to an external audio-amplifier/receiver.

Supported formats/codecs:

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA)
• Container formats: AVI, MPG/MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3GP, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support)
• Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264, including Nero Digital and x264), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak,
• Audio codecs: AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA.
• Digital picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer

Boxee video-playback uses an in-house video-player 'core' originally developed by the XBMC developers as a DVD-player for DVD-Video movies, including the support of DVD-menus, (based on the open source and free libraries code libdvdcss and libdvdnav). This video-player 'core' support all the FFmpeg codecs, and in addition the MPEG-2 video codec, and the audio codecs DTS and AC3 (based on the open source code libraries: libmpeg2, libdca/libdts, and liba52/libac3 respectively). One relatively unusual feature of this DVD-player core is the capability to on-the-fly parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video (IFO/VOB/BUP) files on a harddrive or network-share, and also ISO and IMG DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives. In addition to this, the developers of this video-player 'core' also claim that it offers better quality upscaling of all DVD-Video movies when outputing them to a 720p, 1080i or 1080p HDTV resolutions than what most high-definition television set's own native function for upscaling/upconverting video offers. Another interesting aspect is how Boxee manages to play Flash content on sites such as YouTube and Hulu. Boxee seems to be shipping with a binary-only program called as bxflplayer, which seems to load Adobe's proprietary flash plugin. This program communicates with the main Boxee process via shared memory and it renders the video onto screen. By using this approach, it is possible for Boxee to not only play arbitrary Flash content, it is also possible to control the player using remote controls and other input devices that are more suitable to laid back watching.

The Video Library, one of the Boxee metadata databases, is a key feature of Boxee. It allows for the automatic organization of your video content by information associated with the video files (movies and recorded TV Shows) themselves. The Library Mode view in Boxee allows you to browse your video content by categories such as Genre, Title, Year, Actors and Directors.

For audio playback, Boxee includes an audio-player called PAPlayer (Psycho-Acoustic Audio Player) developed in-house by the XBMC developers. Some of this audio-player core's most notable features are on-the-fly audio frequency resampling to 48 kHz, gapless playback, crossfading, Replay Gain, cue sheet and Ogg Chapter support. PAPlayer handles a very large variety of audio file-formats: MP2, MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, AACplus (AAC+), APE, FLAC, WavPack, Shorten, AIFF, WAV, DTS, AC3, CDDA, WMA, IT, S3M, MOD (Amiga Module), XM, NSF (NES Sound Format), SPC (SNES), GYM (Genesis), SID (Commodore 64), Adlib, YM (Atari ST), ADPCM (GameCube). It also supports many different tagging standards: APEv1, APEv2, ID3v1, ID3v2, ID666 and Vorbis comments.

The Music Library is one of the Boxee metadata databases and another key feature of Boxee. It automatic organizes your music collection by information stored in your music files ID meta tags, such as title, artist, album, genre and popularity.

Boxee handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshow with "Ken Burns Effect", with the use of CxImage open source library code. Boxee can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files; this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Boxee features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons functionality to Boxee, (using the easy to learn Python programming language), without knowledge of the complex C/C++ programming language that the rest of the Boxee software is written in. Current plugin scripts add-ons include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema guides, Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast), and much more.

Boxee also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there are also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. Through Boxee's Python plugin system it is also possible for the end-users to make themselves or add unofficial plugins made by third-party persons for other BitTorrent trackers.

Boxee GUI source code is based on XBMC Media Center which is noted for having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. Users can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC (and Xbox) skins trading.

Even though Boxee is free and open source, it is developed by a commercial start-up company with the goal to someday make Boxee profitable for them. Boxee is however encouraging anyone to submit their own source code patches for new or improved features and functions in Boxee to XBMC (as Boxee uses XBMC as their software framework, and XBMC is a non-profit open source hobby project that is developed only by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain).

Boxee is, like XBMC, a cross-platform software application programmed in C++ (and some assembly); it uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) framework with OpenGL renderer for all versions of Boxee. Some of the libraries that Boxee depends on are also written in the C programming-language, but are used with a C++ wrapper and loaded via Boxee's own DLL loader when used inside Boxee.

This is a list of current software limitations in the Boxee code, (Boxee's base source code is based on XBMC so Boxee has the same software limitations as XBMC).

• Boxee currently cannot play any audio/video files protected/encrypted with DRM (Digital Rights Management), such as music purchased from the iTunes Music Store before DRM restrictions were lifted, MSN Music or Audible.com.
• The ISO 9660 and UDF reader classes currently in Boxee's source code do not support reading multisession authored CD/DVD-media. This means that Boxee can as it is today only read the first sessions of a multisession burnt CD or DVD media disc.
• Currently boxee is not available for AMD64 (64 bit) platform

In October 2008, Boxee won CEA (Consumer Electronics Association)'s i-Stage award^[23], and with it $50,000 prize money to go towards the continued development of Boxee, as well as a free booth at the 2009 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the world's largest consumer technology trade show^[24]. Boxee then in turn donated half of the $50,000 prize money to the developers of XBMC^[25], and XBMC is in itself also an award winning media center software.

On the 9th of January, G4 announced Boxee as the winner of their "Best of the Best products of CES 2009" award (in the "Maximum Tech" category) among all the products displayed at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2009 trade show^[26].

Boxee software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) by the developers, meaning they allow anybody to redistribute Boxee under the conditions of that GPL license.

Boxee's social networking layer library, libboxee, is closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee's online back-end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase.

For most popular video and audio codecs, Boxee includes native support through free and open source software libraries, such as LAME, faad, faac, libmpeg2, and libavcodec (from the FFmpeg project). Since these source code libraries are released under free and open source licenses they are legally redistributable. However, some of these compression methods algorithms, such as the popular MP3 format, are in many countries protected by software patents. Absent a licence, this could possibly make it illegal in certain countries to distribute compiled versions of Boxee which includes support for these formats.

Boxee uses libdvdcss to support playback of DVD-Video movies encrypted using the CSS (Content Scramble System) encryption. The distribution of executable versions of Boxee containing this code could possibly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. and the EU Copyright Directive in European Union member countries which have incorporated it into national law; however, this has never been proven in court regarding open source projects.

• XBMC Media Center, the free and open source media center software upon which Boxee is based.
• Plex (a.k.a. Plexapp), another media center software for Mac OS X that is also based on XBMC.
• MediaPortal, media center software for Microsoft Windows that was also originally based on XBMC.
• List of other software video players
• List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
• FFmpeg, the audio and video codec suite that Boxee uses for all its audio/video player cores

• Boxee official website - Account registration, downloads, blogs, internet forum community.
• Boxee official forums

• xbmcscripts.com (Python scripts which add additional features and functionality to XBMC, Plex, and Boxee)

• Boxee-Addons on Google Code (Third-party addon plugins for Boxee made by third-party developers)
• XBMC-Addons on Google Code (Addon plugins for XBMC, which is also compatible with Plex and Boxee)

• Boxee against other FLOSS Media Centers in Comparison Chart
• Windows Alpha Boxee Review