Last week, shortly after Avner’s post on the updated Beta version and the unfortunate lack of AppleTV support (unless you have your SSH teeth fully grown in), the powers that be resurrected the atvusb-creator for Mac.
Yep. You can now, once more, pwn your AppleTV following these super simple instructions, and get the Boxee Beta on that shiny Apple box. In fact, if you already have Boxee Alpha installed, you should be able to just update Launcher and then update Boxee to achieve the same result
Kudos to JimWiley and hillbilly1980 from the Boxee forum for making the original update script, and Amet, davilla and stephan.diederich from Team XBMC and atvusb-creator for fixing the Launcher, SoftwareMenu and the Creator itself, permitting this goodness.
Enjoy, and let these guys know you appreciate their efforts by commenting below and/or here.
** Installing Boxee on your AppleTV simply adds a Boxee option to the main AppleTV menu. Previous AppleTV functionality remains in tact.
Today we add a huge new content discovery application to Boxee from the guys at Redux.com
As David McIntosh, the founder of Redux, will tell you, there’s 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Within the heaping pile of user-generated content, probably lies a tiny nugget of golden, undigested, raw goodness. Do I want to dig through hours of video and photos to find it? No. That is the Internet’s job. This is where Redux comes in.
Redux lets people create channels of content around certain subjects like Internet memes, favorite shows, music, celebrities, and art… Once a channel is created, other users can submit content into it. A few popular channels from Redux: 110% Awesomeness, Best Music Videos Ever, Art, WTF?, Fail Moments, Top Gear videos. All submissions are timelined, and can be played back to back as a playlist. Users can also give props to their favorite content as well as comment on it, which bumps the item to the top of the timeline.
On the web, Redux.com has a full-screen “TV Mode” that endlessly plays crowd-sourced videos from a specific channel. Don’t like one video, hit the arrow key, and skip to the next. It’s great for killing some time and catching up on the latest memes – whether you’re in a specific channel, or just watching all items as they’re submitted in real-time.
They’ve brought TV mode to Boxee and created a great app. Anyone can run the app and start watching channels while Redux users can login to their accounts to get a more personalized experience. The controls are a bit different than you’re probably accustomed to as there’s no Boxee on screen display, and hitting ESC or back will actually switch between full screen and menu mode. To get out of the app you can select “Exit Redux”. Let us know what you think!
On March 12th at 5pm I will be debating Mark Cuban about the future of TV at the SXSW conference in Austin.
Mark and I had a little back-and-forth in March of 2009. A year has passed, some stuff has changed, a lot has stayed the same. We decided it could be interesting to debate the issues in front of a live audience. SXSW was a perfect choice. It is on Mark’s home turf of Texas, but the attendees are Internet people.
We will debate the viability of the Internet as a source for consuming video entertainment vs. offerings from Cable, Sat and IPTV operators. We have an opposing point of view on almost every issue.
I would like to officially claim the position of underdog in this debate. Here is why:
Though if things get physical I think I can take him out. He didn’t show real skills in his fight with Sheamus (see below), and I was a programmer in the Israeli Defense Force. I feel pretty confident about this one.
If you are attending SXSW this year then I hope you’ll be able to attend the debate. Not sure whether it will be broadcast online, but we’ll share the link here if it is.
We have released a new version of the Boxee Beta (0.9.20.10708). It is actually 37 days later, but I just really wanted to use that title for the blog post…
Since releasing the Beta we have seen significant uptake in usage. Some stats:
150,000 new users joined Boxee
3 million Boxee apps launched
1.5 million TV episodes and Movies were watched
The new version of the Beta includes almost no new features, but rather is focused on bug fixes. We focused on stability issues. Many hangs and crashes were identified and resolved. We spent a bunch of time trying to improve the never-ending saga of handling SMB shares.
All-in-all, more than 500 issues have been resolved.
We could not have done it without the amazing feedback users are giving us. With the Boxee Beta, we have expanded our Early Access list to tens of thousands of users. This Early Access list has developed into a very active community of testers reporting bugs in great detail on http://jira.boxee.tv.
The community has helped us focus on the most important issues and identified points where Boxee needs some TLC.
Here are some of the things that kept us busy:
Multilingual keyboard support: under settings->appearance->region to add keyboards
Significantly improved video quality of our DXVA support
Regained support for older graphics cards (pre-2.0 pixel shader) which was broken after move to DXVA
Improved file scanning performance
Hardware acceleration of H.264 on Intel HD4500 cards
Hang on FLAC tag read over SMB
SMB crashes when canceling SMB operations
Hang on shutdown due to wait for SMB and file scanner
Hang in file scanner when manually scanning a folder
Hangs due to excessive locks around database pool
Hangs when left idle due to UDP sockets leak
Corrupted graphics on some ATI cards (X1600)
Log file cycling (every 32M, old log overrides boxee.old.log)
Present action dialog when clicking on DVD icon to allow browse/eject
Optimization to file scanning making it less IO intensive
Fixes to iPhone remote keyboard under Linux
Added support for m4b playback (audio books)
Crash in ID3 tag reading (playback and background scanning of some mp3 files)
Crash in some wav files which contained extra-info in the wav header (playback and background scanning)
Crash on some rss feeds caused by mis-parsing of empty http headers
Crash on image extraction from mp3 tags (in some cases)
win32: fixed runtime error in some cases where vc90 runtime was not installed properly
Dual screen issues. sometimes a movie would only show black screen when switching screens.
Allow apps to define properties for rtmp streaming
Playback of some internet video streams, mainly coming from playlists (partial read of the network buffer was causing wrong codec detection)
Playlist playback of internet video streams was sometimes using the music player instead of the video player
Playback of music from history (was not working and now it will open the folder played from)
Logout was broken enabling logging-in even after password change (was using stored cookie)
Win32: when launching boxee while another instance is running it will just bring the other instance to front
One thing that remains not addressed is AppleTV support for our Beta. Unfortunately, as AppleTV support was not created by us, we have no control or insight when, if ever, it will be fixed. That said.. For the adventurous, JimWiley & hillbilly1980 have worked on a step-by-step guide for getting your AppleTV running Boxee Beta. Let them know how you like it
Congress held a hearing today examining the proposed acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast. Speaking before the committee were Brian Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast and Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC.
During the hearing the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, Rep. Rick Boucher, asked Zucker “What about Boxee?”. Here’s the clip with the transcript below:
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): What about Boxee? Mr. Zucker you probably are in a better position to answer that. Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?
Zucker (NBC): This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): “Well would you have negotiations with Boxee upon request?”
Zucker (NBC): “We have always said that we’re open to negotiations.”
I’d like to set the record straight regarding Boxee’s access to Hulu. Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.
Above, Mr. Zucker says the original decision was made by Hulu’s management. That is correct, but as Jason Kilar (Hulu’s CEO) wrote in his post, the request came from NBC. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.”
There are now close to a million people using Boxee. When they watch shows from Hulu they are watching the ads and generate real revenues to NBC. We hope we will be able to work with NBC and offer more content and value to Boxee users as we believe a good number of our users will also be willing to pay one-time or subscription fees to access NBC’s content.
Mr. Zucker says they always said they are open to negotiations. That has not been our experience, but at this point, we will take Mr. Zucker’s offer at face value and will contact him. We are eager to work with both Comcast and NBCU to bring more content on more devices to our users. We believe the Internet represents a great opportunity for content owners and we hope that current artificial barriers put on distribution over the Internet will be taken down.
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