#“Bye Bye Boxee (for now)”
I've been a Boxee fanatic since I first installed it over two years ago. We had been running XBMC on several old XBOXes (and still do) but they couldn't handle x.264 video or HDMI so when I built a media PC, I used Boxee. I am absolutely convinced their focus on social is the right way to go. Social watching of TV in 2011 is barely scratching the surface of what's possible.
But Brooklyn, we have a problem. Development on the non-Boxee-Box codebase has ground to a halt. All of their efforts are now on the Boxee Box. And rightly so. When you have VC investment, your job is to generate a return, not bug-fix free code for geeks. Particularly when you are a small team, you have to prioritise revenue generation.
We did some moving around of PCs recently with the result that the media PC is now running Ubuntu 10.10 x86-64 instead of Windows. I happily did this in the knowledge that there was a Boxee installer for this setup. What I had forgotten was what a pain in the ass it is to do anything with video and decent video cards on Linux. Then I found that Boxee crashed trying to play any video. Argghhh.
In parallel to this I discovered that XBMC (the code that Boxee is based on) had been in heavy development on PCs over the past few years. It has versions for Windows and Ubuntu too. I was forced to give it a go due to the Boxee problems and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's very good indeed (apart from the 1980s Amstrad twin-tape-deck shiny black colour scheme).
A few video glitches on XBMC made me try the ATI-AMD proprietary video driver instead of the OpenSource one. It didn't solve the XBMC pause-restart glitch but it did make Boxee work. In black and white :-(
I then tried a nightly build of XBMC and wow! All of the TV show preview stuff is brilliant, including episode synopses. Development is obviously moving ahead quickly.
I continue to recommend Boxee Boxes to anyone who asks me about media centres but I don't have $200 spare to buy something that I can already do via the media PC. Hopefully the Boxee guys will sort out the Ubuntu problems at some point and then I'll be back. But for now, XBMC it is.