The Boxee Beta
We are very excited to unveil the Boxee Beta. It is a big step in the evolution of Boxee, but rather than bore you with sentimental prose about how the path we took to get here, I wanted to dive right into what’s new with the Beta release.
Home Screen:
We’ve completely re-designed the home screen to make it easier to navigate to your favorite content. We’ve pulled the menu out from the side and put it front and center. Below is your hub for recommendations and content; See recommendations from friends on boxee, Facebook or Twitter (Feed), recommendations from Boxee’s staff and partners (Featured) and the latest episodes from your favorite shows or things you’ve saved for later (Queue).
Global Menu:
This is one of our favorite additions to the Beta – the global menu. This menu makes it easy to access helpful resources (TOP – Logout, Settings, Queue, Feed, History), the main menu (MIDDLE – Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps, Files) and shortcuts (BOTTOM) to your favorite Apps, TV Shows, Movies, or folders.
TV Shows & Movies:
We overhauled Movies and TV shows to include both Internet and local content; If you know what it is you want to watch, we’ll show you where you can find it and start playing it immediately – no need to go through an App. Not sure what you’re in the mood for, we’ve made it easy to browse a ton of popular movies from the Internet by selecting the Movie library.
We’ve put a special focus on TV Shows to better organize what you can watch. Boxee now organizes TV shows by season and episode, and let’s you filter by whether freely available or not, so once you’ve seen all the free episodes you can decide if that DVD is worth it.
Queue:
The Boxee Queue is a list that you control and manage. You can put almost anything into your Queue, a movie, a TV show episode, an Internet stream, a local file. In addition, if you added your favorite TV shows into My Shows then new episodes will automatically be added to your Queue. Unwatched items will appear in bold, white font.
Applications:
We have made it easy for you to find and test new apps. You can sort by popularity or browse the newest additions to the Boxee App Library. Clicking on App will let you choose whether you’d like to run it, add it to My Apps (the list of your favorite apps) or add it as a Shortcut. We also made it easier to add and browse 3rd party App repositories.
Sharing:
We have made it easier to share what you are watching and also let you put your own custom message, which will be sent to your Boxee, Twitter and Facebook followers.
Getting the best out of your Windows machine:
As part of the Beta we also changed the underlying graphic library on Windows from OpenGL to DirectX, and we’re now taking advantage of DXVA, which means Boxee for Windows just got faster and can play 1080p without your CPU breaking a sweat. There is now a long list of affordable Windows-based devices that can turn into a kick-ass media center (e.g. Acer Revo, Dell Zino, HP Mini)
- Bug fixes
- Performance improvements
- Official support for Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic
We plan to open up the Beta to the public on Jan 7th (at CES). Over the next 4 weeks we will gradually release invitations to our early access users (you can add your name to the early access list here) and then to existing alpha users. We hope your testing will help us identify any major issues and resolve them by the time of our public release. Thank you all for your on going support!!
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Can you enable “subtitles” on the tv shows and movies?
already a member would love to get a invitation to beta…………please
I have been a loyal Boxee user for over a year now and would love to get on the beta invite list. However, every time I try to add my name to the pre-release list via the Google Docs form I get an error. Anyone else getting this error? Are you guys at Boxee aware of this?
i get the error too.
me too
“Something bad happened. Don’t worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we’ll get right on it.”
me too with the error when I sign up thing … waiting patiently .. ? .. for invitation.
What OS does Boxee work best on? I’m talking for video formats and streaming from hulu and netflix?
both Mac and Win should be good. Ubuntu is great, but no Netflix
Will this version allow us manually organize our media when the auto-organize fails?
the one that comes to the public will enable it
I want to experience the new Boxee really bad. I don’t understand why we have to wait if we are already on the early access list from before. Any idea how much longer? I’m about to burst!!
Both(yes I ordered two) of my My Dell Zinos are scheduled to arrive Dec 17th. Ordered specifically for boxee. I have been running boxee on the ATV for about a year now. I am hoping the beta will sit nicely on them.. cause it sure looks fancy
. Nice work!
Looking forward to trying out the beta on my Dell Zino too.
wow, great stuff!
Been using xbmc for years but this is even better in my opinion.
Downloaded it for my mac mini.
Going to hook it up to my tv. Works great with the mac remote i got
Avner, I’m still waiting on my refunded subway fare to/from your beta launch. it was poor community mgmt to overbook the venue to such an extent and not to inform anyone. i arrived before showtime and was turned away, rudely by someone on your staff. normally, i’d be sanguine about it. but not this time on the principle that i lost money coming to support boxee and had a shitty experience. i’m a very early adopter, and evangelist, of boxee and will continue to use it. but i’m serious about the refund.
-hudson
I apologize for the way you were handled at the door. We offered people who arrived later and could not come in to meet us at Brooklyn Bowl and we arranged with Brooklyn Bowl so that you’ll get a free drink on us.
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