Photo Licensed under Creative Commons from Slideshow Bruce

Besides doing a meetup in each one of these cities we’d like to meet and talk with users, students, and developers. Keeping with the tradition of a relaxed backyard party for a few hundred people… we’ll be throwing a  kegger in Austin with great BBQ again – start getting your stupid human tricks ready : )

With this in mind, we need some help from Boxee fans out there. Please leave a comment if you can help with any of the items below:

• Venue for meetup in each city – if you live in Washington DC, Memphis or Dallas and have an idea for a venue (bar, big office, club, university) that can host ~ 100 people
• A fixer – in each of these cities would be great if we would have a local “fixer” that can help secure the venue, arrange for drinks, food, sound system and in general be able to hustle.
• Great stops along the way – any good ideas for must-stop spots along on our way. this is our current drive plan: http://b0x.ee/zzh3FE.
• Bail agent –  as a cab driver in vegas once told me “when in a new town, it’s always good to have a phone number for a good bail agent”

On the morning of March 5th we will pick up a GMC Yukon (or something similar Hertz tells us) and get going. We will drive it like a rental, play loud music, moon fellow travelers, eat greasy food, stay in cheap motels.  We’ll also be giving out T-shirts, Boxee Boxes by D-Link, Boxee Live TV along the way.

Currently our schedule looks like this (click on a Meetup to RSVP):

March 5th (Mon) – Washington, D.C. Meetup

March 7th (Wed) – Memphis Meetup

March 8th (Thu) – Dallas Meetup

March 9-12th (Fri-Sat) – Drink. Party. Meet with people. Dance.

March 11th (Sun) – The 2nd Annual Boxee SxSW Kegger (1p – 6pm)
If you were there last year you know it was a good time.  We’re going to try and keep the same easy going atmosphere this year so you can just come out and meet good people, have some food, and have a few drinks. We’ll send out more updates as the date gets closer.

March 12th (Mon) – Fly back to NYC. Start cleansing process.

We look forward to seeing you there!

- Team Boxee

We can’t remember what it was like to enjoy music prior to the streaming era that has consumed us all. Since its arrival though, one glaring problem remained: we couldn’t bring our online playlists to Boxee…until now! Grooveshark has arrived on Boxee, bringing some serious music streaming goodness to your home stereo system.

Huge Collection, Past and Present
Grooveshark’s catalogue won’t leave you wanting. Access millions of songs from every genre, from Rock to Classical to Electronic to Folk.

Check Out What’s Popular
The Grooveshark Popular List lets you check out what’s hot at the moment. Keep up with music trends and new tracks without being bombarded by ads (a la commercial radio).

Curate Your Music Library

You don’t have to dig through the mountains of music available every time you build a new playlist. Grooveshark makes it easy for you to build your own personal library. If you see something you like you can add it to your library with just 2 clicks. Then access your library from anywhere you want. Even on your mobile devices.

Create Playlists
Create and save playlists in the app, or any browser, then access them from anywhere.

The app is free to try for a few weeks and if you end up loving it – give up buying one cheap meal a month ($9) and all the music you can stream is on Boxee, your phone, and your computer. Once you’ve got an account – your playlists and music library are loaded up no matter what device you’re using.

To celebrate the launch, we’ve partnered to give away tons of Grooveshark premium accounts and 5 Boxee Boxes – head over to http://boxee.grooveshark.com/ to win!

Databazaar Media provides unlimited streaming of Movies, TV Shows and Music Videos in over six Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, English, Tamil, Marathi etc. for a flat monthly rate of $7.99.  Not sure about subscribing?  You can easily browse movies on the Databazaar website, and sign up for a one week trial absolutely free. Once you’ve signed in, run the Databazaar App on Boxee to bring the best Indian films to your TV whenever you want it.

Services like Databazaar continue to highlight the benefits of streaming entertainment – namely that filmmakers from the other side of the globe are able to deliver their movies to huge new markets quickly and easily.   We’re happy to be working with Databazaar to support Indian filmmakers, and very excited to share all their great content with our users.

So it might only be a few decimal points difference from the current 1.0.4 release, but this version of the Boxee Box by D-Link has quite a few new things under the hood.  We’ll be rolling this version out over the next few days to all Boxee Boxes, but if you can’t wait you can find instructions on manually updating your Boxee Box on our forums.

Here’s what we’ve got for you in our fifth update to the Boxee Box:

1) Browser Upgrades

Favorites (Bookmarks) & History – Now you can easily get back to pages you’ve just viewed or ones you visit most often.

New On Screen Display (no auto-full screen*) – We’ve cleaned up the web playback OSD to let you see more of what’s going on in the background and to include access to a few more options down below.

HTML 5 To The Max – We’ve improved our support for HTML 5 so you’ll now be able to access more content, like HBOGO.

2) Movie Trailers – What better way to keep up with the latest movie releases than by watching movie trailers on your TV until your heart’s content.

3) On Screen Display Loses Some Weight – We’ve revamped the OSD and included an awesome new seek bar for precise rewinding/fast forwarding, slimmed down the button count, and made it easier to see what’s going on behind the scenes.  We’ve also removed the volume control for a more consistent experience.*

4) Customized Artwork / Info for Media Files  - Why let Boxee pick movie art and descriptions when you can have your own? Import video into Boxee and add your own artwork and metadata to accompany it with NFO files.  Works like a charm on home movies.

5) Local File Playback - We now have support HFS formatted drives, seek functionality inside music playback, and you can filter local files by source.

6) Share Where You Want – now you can specify whether you want to share that ColdSteel video to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr with a helpful character counter built-in.

7) MLB.TV Upgrades – This new version has enabled a lot of updates to the MLB.TV app so now you’ll be able to watch live and archived games, jump to specific innings or game events, see pop-up details on every pitch, and have a much easier time rewinding and fast-forwarding in games.

More Languages – The Boxee Box is on sale in 34 countries. While “Boxee” translates well into all of them, the rest of the words on screen are a bit off. Now users can enjoy Boxee in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Danish, Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Portugese (Brazil), Czech, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish.

9) New Content – we threw in some extra content just for good measure.

A team of acclaimed producers create fresh programs on private jets and exotic first-class travel as well as intellectual discussion on money and philanthropy, all in HD.

Committed to finding the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers to make them available to the wide audience these titles deserve. SnagFilms serves up full-length documentary films for free.

Conclusion

We hope you like all the changes (full release notes here), and we always love to hear your feedback on Facebook, Twitter, and on our forums.

You may have noticed the * next to the volume and auto full-screen features above.  We’ve spent a lot of time discussing internally and have decided to create a more consistent experience by removing features that work inconsistently.  While it might not instantly be apparent,  over the next few versions we will streamline the interface so that everything works the same, no matter whether you’re in an HTML 5 app, a normal web page, playing a movie file, or watching video from inside an application.

**UPDATE – We have heard from enough passionate users about the volume control functionality that we will be bringing it back via settings in the next update. We will continue to search for an elegant solution that works across content sources as well.

**2ND UPDATE – If your sound isn’t being processed properly in the new version – we have fixed the issue and it will be part of a new version rolling out to users this week (that also includes the volume control update above).

Vindicia’s CashBox solution will enable Boxee content partners to offer premium content through a wide variety of payment methods and plans, from individual pay-per-view charges to premium subscription models.  Vindicia’s flexibility will enable Boxee content partners to price and package their content as they wish, whether it is premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never made it “on air.”  Users will be able to purchase this content via credit card, gift card, or PayPal.

The unique solution, which handles currency exchanges, VAT, and GST automatically, will be available to content providers worldwide.  Vindicia already powers great experiences for online gaming (Blizzard), online stores (deviantArt.com), and subscription software (Symantec) and we’re excited to be working with them to build an awesome experience on Boxee.

Lastly, while Boxee plans to make the payment platform available to content partners for Boxee’s unique TV experience, Vindicia’s flexibility also makes it possible for us to enable payments on our website and across mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and iPad.  Boxee’s eventual expansion to these platforms will pave the way for universally accessible content no matter where a user is (we love this idea!).

We will release the Boxee payment platform by the end of the summer.

we shot the video in Amsterdam during the XBMC DEV CON. it was the first time that team-xbmc came together and met in person to discuss past, present and future. and party.

our camera man, dave, got a bit too much of Amsterdam in him… so some of the video is a bit choppy, but it is still the first ever, never-before-seen, excluisve, on-camera interviews with the people behind xbmc.

enjoy!