Boxee first impressions

[evilpenguin]

Just for fun, I loaded up the Boxee alpha onto my Mac to see what all the fuss was about and overall I came away impressed with the progress they’ve made and direction they’re headed.  Here’s a quick list of stuff I really liked right off the bat…

* MetaData scraping – They put some serious thought into this.  I imported a folder that had media that ran the gambit from being meticulously labeled (“Arrested Development 01×03 – Bringing Up Buster.avi”) to the awful (“burn.notice.s01e09.dsr-cocknbulls.[VTV].avi”, “burn.notice.107.dsr.xvid.notv.[VTV]”).  And yet Boxee was able to guess that they were TV shows, pull down the proper episode metadata from TV.com, and then organize and sort them using this data.  It even understood the concept of seasons which, surprisingly, I think is a first for PVR software.  My todo list tonight is to see what it does on one of my SageTV Recordings directories.  My guess is that it’ll choke, but even if it does it could easily be fixed with a simple forum post to one of the devs.

* Social TV viewing – I didn’t quite understand why this was so prominently featured in Boxee at first but after sleeping on it, I’m starting to get it.  My biggest problem at the start of the summer as well as the start of the new TV season is that, since I don’t watch any commercials, I have no idea what new shows there are.  I ended up checking Brent’s website every week to read his rundown of new shows coming up, but with Boxee I could have gotten all that info straight from my friends’ feed. 

* Social Music – The implementation really reminded me of the Zune Social software, which I love.  Basically I started playing some music out of my tiny collection, and while I was listening (and enjoying some very nice visualizations) it had the option to seamlessly branch out into Last.FM and start listening to a station based off of the song or artist I was listening too.  The whole thing struck me as “wow, this is just how it should be”, which is pretty impressive for alpha software.  I’m really curious to see what other options open up as I expand my friends list and start finding people who like the same music as me.

* Flash Support – Boxee is a perfect example of all the wonderful possibilities that open up when you can support Flash (And hopefully soon Silverlight).  They aren’t doing any specialized voodoo black magic to support Hulu, they just go to the page, parse the source to find the flash object, and open it up in their window.  Nothing shady or possibly illegal about it (*cough* PlayOn *cough*).  Using this type open ended solution they should be able to easily and quickly add support for these sites as they continue to pop up.  It seems the only limitation is going to be the availability of keyboard shortcuts in the flash applications themselves.

There’s stuff I wasn’t too fond of either, but I want to spend some more time with the software to get more of a feel for it.

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