last night the SourceForge Community Choice Awards winners were announced at a party held as part of OSCON.

XBMC won “Best Project for Gamers”. XBMC was nominated for a few other awards like “Most Likely to Change the World” (awarded to Linux) and “Most Likely to get Users Sued” (awarded to eMule). the one i personally wanted us to win was “Best Project for Multimedia”, which went to VLC.

“Best Project” went to OpenOffice (which was the biggest winner of the night taking home 3 awards).

i guess XBMC is still more known as that cool media center thing that runs on the old xbox, but during the past 12 months we’ve been working on porting XBMC to Linux, Mac and Windows, which made boxee possible. so hopefully next year we’ll be able to win other categories.

in any case it’s great to get this sort of recognition. team-xbmc is doing an amazing job in a space where Microsoft and Apple have struggled to come out with good products. now that XBMC is going beyond the original xbox we hope many more users will get to know it.

P.S

no one from XBMC was there to receive the award and give an acceptance speech.. so here are a couple of inspiring acceptance speeches

Amy Winehouse

Adrian Brody

the linux version of boxee is available for download!

if you already received an invite then you’ll find links to download versions for Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04. we figured that between Gutsy Gibbon and Hardy Heron we will cover most of the Ubuntu users out there.

we have not played with running boxee on other Linux distros, nor did we test boxee on all hardware combos, driver versions, etc. so this is a work in progress and we hope that alpha testers will try running boxee in all kinds of environments and send us their feedback.

having boxee running on linux is also exciting because it opens the door for boxee to run on a variety of hardware platforms and configurations, from users building their own media centers to hacking existing boxes to run linux/boxee.

software requirements:

• for nvidia gpus, latest nvidia proprietary drivers from nvidia
• for ati gpus, latest ati proprietary drivers from ati
• if you have a lirc compatible remote, for example, windows MCE remote, install lirc using sudo apt-get install lirc command. we also support direct hardware mapping for supporting Apple IR and other usb based devices usually not supported under lirc

we tested boxee with the following hardware configurations (though other setups may be supported as well):

gpu

• nvidia 6150le igp, go7300 mobile, 8600m gt mobile and 7,8 series desktop gpus
• intel 945*, 965, X3000, X3100 igp
• ati x1600 mobile gpu

cpu

• current intel and amd processors

audio

• intel hda

known issues

• this is alpha software. ’nuff said.
• at times, boxee may cause elevated cpu usage, and become sluggish, requiring an application restart
• some dvd titles may not play. this has already been fixed in internal builds, and should be made available in the next version.
• visual effects (compiz fusion) should be disabled. this is done by System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects, set to None

please send us your feedback and questions to support [at] boxee.tv or http://forum.boxee.tv.

every monday for the past month, including yesterday, i’ve been uploading a batch file with email addresses from people signing up at boxee.tv. these have become known at our office as “boxee mondays”, and are accompanied by a spur of emails to support and our (more) constant monitoring of the server, given that there is also an organic growth of users driven by friend invitations.

this monday was also special with introduction of a new privacy feature.

the new privacy setting (available on your account page) allows you to control who gets to see what you’ve been watching and listening to. by default you share with the world what movies, tv shows and music you are playing on boxee. now you can set boxee to only share this info with your friends, or if you’re really shy you can decide not to share it with anyone.

on to another subject, i’d like to remind you sourceforge 2008 community choice awards voting ends in a few days – make sure to vote for your favorite software, XBMC, of course, which powers boxee. cast your vote here.

boxee supports both downloading and streaming of content, so we don’t have a religious view as to which one is better.

some argue that with 100MB (or higher..) bandwidth to the home downloading will become obsolete, while others draw the complete opposite conclusion.

i think both methods of consuming content are here to stay.

for a streaming only world you need to be always connected (subways, trains, cars, rural areas, planes), for the bandwidth to be at least 30MB all the time, and for the bandwidth to be unlimited and priced reasonably. does not seem this is going to happen in the next 10yrs (i am not going to make any attempt of tech predictions beyond this time frame…)

for a download only world you need to not care about storage and for content providers to not care about paying for distributing their content to consumers who may never watch it. i think the latter is the bigger issue. it is more likely that content providers will look to optimize their delivery with P2P and multi-casting, or find other ways to minimize their distribution costs.

so i don’t think there will be a winner here. both methods of consumption will continue to thrive. on boxee i have access to thousands of videos over RSS. and they are all currently being streamed. if boxee would have downloaded each RSS feed i have access to, even my new Drobo with 3TB of storage would not have been enough.

as many of you know boxee is powered by XBMC, which is one of the best open-source projects ever. now SourceForge is having their 2008 Community Choice Awards, and it would be great if you could show your love to boxee/XBMC by casting your vote for XBMC.

Team-XBMC have recently received the news that the XBMC media center project has been nominated as finalist in the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards (CCA) in no less than seven categories! this is the third annual SourceForge CCA – in the first year XBMC won two of the categories (“best multimedia project” and “best game project”), and last year it was nominated in six categories however not enough XBMC fans voted so we did not win any category

please registered a user on SourceForge.net (registration is free) and then vote for the XBMC project in one or more categories.

http://sourceforge.net/account/register.php

http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/?group_id=87054

the winning projects will be announced at the SourceForge CCA party on July 24th (2008) during OSCON at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon. the prize if we win: ‘bragging rights’ and the honour to display SourceForge.net CCA logo on the XBMC website.

we have just released a new alpha version of boxee for mac.
if you’re already an alpha user we highly recommend to upgrade your current version (go to http://app.boxee.tv/download).

the new version includes many bug fixes and some new functionality (details below).

we have also opened community forums for alpha users to discuss features, bugs, ideas or life in general. you’re all welcome to join the discussion.

last but not least. we are sending out more invites today.

if you want to make sure you are on the list just leave a comment on this post or send me an email directly to tsella [at] boxee [dot] tv

what’s in the new version:

• many, many, many fixes and tweaks (see list below) – thank you all for keeping our support guys from going on coffee breaks
• DVD playback is now working. now when there is a disc in the drive a new icon will appear on the boxee menu, and you can click it to play your DVDs (please make sure to disable auto-playback of DVD in your Mac settings before you insert a disc while boxee is running)
  
• a movie-trailer application from xbmc (you will need to delete your profile for this to show up, sorry. please see the forum thread explaining how to do this)
• added support for Apple-Tab for switching between boxee and other application. first time boxee will go to Windowed mode, and next allows application switching.

known issues:

• muxtape script no longer working as of June 30^th due to web site changes (we need to talk with justin..)
• logoff is temporarily disabled, please exit and restart boxee if you wish to switch profile, sorry
  

list of fixed issues:

• improved stability (thanks to all those who sent in their crash logs!
• resolved several issues with Python scripting engine
• significantly improved boxee exit times
• media items from youtube, CNN, etc. can now be recommended to friends
• fixed instances where thumbnails would not load properly
• improved Apple Remote navigation
• fixed Lyrics for music coming from Internet Music > Audio Channels
• fixed “More Info” button on audio and video streams
• fixed Private flagged content indexing (don’t worry, another bug made it work just right in the interim)
• fixed several typos, thank you eagle eyed friends!
• mouse is now disabled by default