Diemazz

Boxee

Boxee Home Screen
Developed by	Boxee
Written in	C++
OS	Linux(IA-32 only)[1] , Mac OS X, Windows(200 user alpha)
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	International (multiple languages)
Type	Media Player / Media Center
License	GNU GPL
Website	boxee.tv

Boxee is a free cross-platform media center and entertainment hub with social networking features that is a fork of Open Source XBMC media center software^[2][3][4][5]. As a "'Social Media Center", Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger)^[6], Apple TV^[7], and Linux^[8] for Intel processors with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008^[9]. Availability is limited to registered Alpha testers^[10]. Currently that limit was set to 5000, but then each those Alpha testers may in turn invite anyone they want outside of the 5000-person limit, and those may invite other people and so on^[11]. A Microsoft Windows Alpha version is said to become available in Q1 2009^[12].

Boxee said they are planning on releasing their own dedicated set-top box (hardware) for Boxee in 2009, and also plan to license the Boxee software to third-parties for them to use Boxee in their hardware set-top boxes like for example cable-TV companies^[13][14], Boxee has also stated that their goal is to have Boxee run on as many platforms as possible^[15].

Overview

Boxee media center software is being developed by a startup company. Boxee supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.

Through its Python plugin system, Boxee includes features such as YouTube and Apple movie trailer support, SHOUTcast, and Podcast streaming, as well as online picture viewing of such services such as Flickr and Picasa.

Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p, however as Boxee does not currently support hardware video decoding it is placing the entire load of the video decoding process on the system's CPU which means that users need by today's standards a very powerful CPU to decode native 1080p videos encoded with the H.264 codec.

Boxee source code is based upon XBMC which it uses as its framework, and the Boxee developers contribute source code back upstream to the XBMC project^[16][17]. Boxee is distributed under the GNU General Public License (with a few libraries used by Boxee licensed under the LGPL). Boxee's social networking layer library, libboxee, is however closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee's online back-end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase.

Features

Social Networking Layers

The social networking component of Boxee is its major differentiators from other media center software, and it comes into play in three ways.

First, Boxee incorporates internet content services like BBC radio, Jamendo, Last.fm, NPR, and SHOUTcast internet audio plugins, and movie trailers of apple.com, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, NBC Universal's Hulu, MTV Music (music videos)^[18], MySpaceTV, Netflix^[19], Revision3, YouTube, Warner Bros Television Network^[20] internet video plugins, and Flickr and PicasaWeb picture plugins. All as media sources available alongside your local library. Some of these are specialized connections to services (e.g., YouTube), while the rest are a preselected list of generic RSS web feeds (e.g., BBC News).

Second, Boxee requires registered user accounts, which form a social network of fellow Boxee users. You can follow the activity of other Boxee users who you add as friends, they can do the same to you, and you can publicly rate and recommend content. You can control what media appear in your activity feed in order to maintain your privacy. If you recommend something that is freely available from a internet content service then Boxee with let others users stream it directly, and if you recommend something that is not freely available then Boxee you try to show meta data information, and trailers if it is a movie.

Third, Boxee can export your media activity feed to other social networking services such as FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr. The list of supported sites is small, and this feature is one-way, (you cannot yet monitor Twitter feeds from within Boxee), but this type of third-party integration is different from the way content sources as treated. Through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr you can then choose to feed your Boxee activity feed onwards to social networking sites such as Facebook, (currently through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr apps for Facebook). Your friends' Boxee activity feeds are displayed on your home screen, as is your own recent activity. You access internet content through a sub-menu of each of the video, audio, and photo menu items, such as Video -> "My videos" and Video -> "Internet videos."

Audio/Video playback and handling

Boxee can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the systems DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), ReplayTV DVRs, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play ) shares, or XBMSP (Xbox Media Stream Protocol) shares. Boxee is designed to take advantage of the systems network port if broadband Internet connection if available, using the IMDb to obtain meta data information, thumbnails, and reviews on movies, and TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via FreeDB) is used for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Boxee can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Boxee can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.

Format support

Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats. It can decode these in software and optionally pass-through AC3/DTS audio from movies directly to S/PDIF output to an external audio-amplifier/receiver.

Supported formats/codecs:

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA)
• Container formats: AVI, MPG/MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3GP, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support)
• Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP, including DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264, including Nero Digital and x264), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak,
• Audio codecs: AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey's Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA.
• Digital picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer

Video playback in detail

Boxee video-playback uses an in-house video-player 'core' originally developed by the XBMC developers as a DVD-player for DVD-Video movies, including the support of DVD-menus, (based on the open source and free libraries code libdvdcss and libdvdnav). This video-player 'core' support all the FFmpeg codecs, and in addition the MPEG-2 video codec, and the audio codecs DTS and AC3 (based on the open source code libraries: libmpeg2, libdca/libdts, and liba52/libac3 respectively). One relatively unusual feature of this DVD-player core is the capability to on-the-fly parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video (IFO/VOB/BUP) files on a harddrive or network-share, and also ISO and IMG DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives. In addition to this, the developers of this video-player 'core' also claim that it offers better quality upscaling of all DVD-Video movies when outputing them to a 720p, 1080i or 1080p HDTV resolutions than what most high-definition television set's own native function for upscaling/upconverting video offers.

The Video Library

The Video Library, one of the Boxee metadata databases, is a key feature of Boxee. It allows for the automatic organization of your video content by information associated with the video files (movies and recorded TV Shows) themselves. The Library Mode view in Boxee allows you to browse your video content by categories such as Genre, Title, Year, Actors and Directors.

Audio playback in detail

For audio playback, Boxee includes its the audio-player called PAPlayer (Psycho-Acoustic Audio Player) developed in-house by the XBMC developers. Some of this audio-player core's most notable features are on-the-fly audio frequency resampling to 48 kHz, gapless playback, crossfading, Replay Gain, cue sheet and Ogg Chapter support. PAPlayer handles a very large variety of audio file-formats: MP2, MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, AACplus (AAC+), APE, FLAC, WavPack, Shorten, AIFF, WAV, DTS, AC3, CDDA, WMA, IT, S3M, MOD (Amiga Module), XM, NSF (NES Sound Format), SPC (SNES), GYM (Genesis), SID (Commodore 64), Adlib, YM (Atari ST), ADPCM (GameCube). It also supports many different tagging standards: APEv1, APEv2, ID3v1, ID3v2, ID666 and Vorbis comments.

Music Library

The Music Library, one of the Boxee metadata databases, another key feature of Boxee. It allows for the automatic organization of your music collection by information stored in your music file ID meta tags, like title, artist, album, genre and popularity.

Digital picture/image display in detail

Boxee handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshow with "Ken Burns Effect", with the use of CxImage open source library code. Boxee can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Add-on plugins (widgets/gadgets) python scripts

Boxee features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons functionality to Boxee, (using the easy to learn Python programming language), without knowledge of the complex C/C++ programming language. Current plugin scripts add-ons include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema guides, Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast), and much more.

Skins, skinning, and the skinning-engine

Boxee source code is based on XBMC is noted as having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. Users can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC (and Xbox) skins trading.

Programming and developing

Even though Boxee is free and open source it is a commercial start-up company who develops Boxee with the goal to someday make Boxee profitable for them. Boxee is however encouraging anyone to submit their own source code patches for new or improved features and functions in Boxee to XBMC (as Boxee uses XBMC as their software framework, and XBMC is non-profit open source hobby project that is developed only by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain).

Boxee is (just like XBMC) a cross-platform software application programmed in C++ (and some Assembly), Boxee uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) framework with OpenGL renderer for all versions of Boxee. Some of the libraries that Boxee depends on are also written in the C programming-language, but are used with a C++ wrapper and loaded via Boxee's own DLL loader when used inside Boxee.

Limitations

This is a list of current software limitations in the Boxee code, (Boxee's base source code is based on XBMC so Boxee has the same software limitations as XBMC).

• Boxee can not currently play any audio/video files protected/encrypted with DRM (Digital Rights Management), such as music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, MSN Music or Audible.com. Workaround if legal in your country: Before playing the file in Boxee, first remove any DRM protection/encryption from the song or video with a third-party program before you try to play it, e.g: hymn, FreeMe, FairUse4WM, DRM2WMV or DRMDBG).
• The ISO 9660 and UDF reader classes currently in Boxee's source code do not support reading multisession authored CD/DVD-media. This means that Boxee can as it is today only read the first sessions of a multisession burnt CD or DVD media disc.

Reception

In October 2008 Boxee won CEA (Consumer Electronics Association)'s i-Stage award^[21], and with it $50,000 prize money to go towards the continued development of Boxee, as well as a free booth at the 2009 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the worlds largest consumer technology trade show^[22]. On a related side-note, Boxee donated half of the $50,000 prize money to the developers of XBMC^[23], and XBMC is in itself also an award winning media center software.

Legality

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Copyright

Boxee software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) by the developers, meaning they allow anybody to redistribute Boxee under the conditions of that GPL license.

Patents

For most popular video and audio codecs, Boxee includes native support through free and open source software libraries, such as LAME, faad, faac, libmpeg2, and libavcodec (from the FFmpeg project). Since these source code libraries are released under free and open source licenses they are legally redistributable. However, some of these compression methods algorithms, such as the popular MP3 format, are in many countries protected by software patents. Absent a licence, this could possibly make it illegal in certain countries to distribute compiled versions of Boxee which includes support for these formats.

Other

Boxee uses libdvdcss to support playing back DVD-Video movies encrypted using the CSS (Content Scramble System) encryption. The distribution of executable versions of Boxee containing this code could possibly fall afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. and the EU Copyright Directive in European Union member countries which have incorporated it into national law; however, this has never been proven in court regarding open source projects.

See also

Free software portal

• XBMC, the open source media center software upon which Boxee is based.
• Plex (a.k.a. Plexapp), another media center software for Mac OS X that is also based on XBMC.
• MediaPortal, media center software for Microsoft Windows that was also originally based on XBMC.
• List of other software video players
• List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
• FFmpeg, the audio and video codec suite that Boxee uses for all its audio/video player cores

References

External links

Official site

• Boxee official website - Account registration, downloads, blogs, internet forum community.

Scripts and plugins (addon extensions for boxee)

Scripts

• xbmcscripts.com (Python scripts which add additional features and functionality to XBMC, PLEX and Boxee)

Plugins

• XBMC-Addons on Google Code (Addon plugins for XBMC, PLEX and Boxee)

Reviews

• Boxee against other FLOSS Media Centers in Comparison Chart

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