January 2009

Boxee is a free and easy-to-use cross-platform media center that puts all your videos—and most of the web’s—in one place. Loaded on a small, cheap, and sleek computer, it might just change your living room forever.

Photo by philcampbell.

If you vaguely recall hearing similarly over-the-top pronouncements before, you’re almost certainly right. For more than a decade, pundits have been saying that your internet connection would, any day now, be the primary pipeline for television shows, on-demand movies, YouTube videos, music videos, video podcast feeds, online radio, personalized audio streams, online and offline pictures and music—anything you could fit on your screen, really.

Enter Boxee

Boxee‘s media center gives you that, and all from one application. It’s free, it’s open source, it’s built from the guts of the killer Xbox Media Center (which is still a quite active project itself), and it simply works. Loaded onto an Apple TV, or any TV-connected computer, Boxee also gives you free license to drop your cable or satellite dependency with hardly any regret, especially once you realize your year-to-year savings. First, let’s take a closer look at what makes Boxee so great; then I’ll walk you through installing Boxee on your Apple TV.

Here’s a clip of Boxee in action, narrated by one of its project heads:

With over-the-air television going all-digital in the near future, the era of antenna-pointing voodoo and suffering through fuzzy signals is over—you’ll either get a channel, often in HD quality, or you won’t. And Boxee, at least on Macs and Apple TV units, can stream all of the offerings put up by the four major networks on the net, stepping in whenever you didn’t catch the live broadcast. [Note: We say 'at least on Macs and Apple TV' because ABC.com streaming through Boxee is supported only on Mac platforms—for now]

An Apple TV is the cheapest, easiest way to put the Boxee experience onto your television, unless you happen to have a spare Mac Mini, or another computer with great A/V hook-ups. Out of the box, an Apple TV can connect to your TV through component or HDMI cables, supporting resolutions up to 1080p (though Boxee can sometimes only handle 720p, with marginally noticeable difference), and offers optical or RCA audio out. It hooks into your home network wirelessly or through an ethernet port, and comes with its own remote. For a starting price of $200, you get a slim, sleek, scarily quiet and cool system with a 40GB drive (easily upgraded by tinkerers). It looks nice in any entertainment center and, even with Boxee installed, you’ll get to use all its regular features, including movie rentals, iTunes streaming, and—even while Boxee’s running—serving as a pair of remote AirTunes speakers.

The one true disadvantage to Boxee on Apple TV versus a computer hook-up is a lack of Netflix support, due entirely to the Apple TV’s slower processor. If Apple upgrades the line someday, or an optimizing breakthrough is reached, it could happen, but it doesn’t appear likely for the near future. If that’s a deal-breaker, look into a PC or Mac to hook into your screen.

But we’re here to get you started with Boxee, which opens up your media and network far, far wider than Apple would dare to. So get yourself a USB drive with at least 512MB of free space, a Windows or Mac computer, and un-box your Apple TV. It’s time to install Boxee:

Making the USB installer

Note: Some USB drives, unfortunately, just won’t be accepted by an Apple TV for booting, and it has nothing to do with size. From what I’ve read, the standard brands, the kind you can buy on the racks at, say, Target, tend to do better than that freebie drive you got from a conference. I know for sure my Lexar JD Secure II + 4GB drive will work, but that’s all I can say for certain—Google your USB drive and ‘Apple TV’ or ‘atv-usb’ to check for potential show-stoppers.

Windows users: Head to the atvusb-creator site and grab the ‘interim solution’ ZIP package for XP/Vista. Windows’ built-in ZIP handler won’t be able to handle the file, though, so grab a copy of the free 7-zip. Use it to extract the contents of that atv-win archive (you can usually right-click, then choose 7-Zip, Extract Here).

Inside that atv-win folder you extracted (ignore the _MACOSX item) you’ll see two ‘batch’ files, mk-atv-xbmc and mk-atv-xbmc-ssh. Unless you’ve already installed Xbox Media Center or an older Boxee on your Apple TV, you’re going to run the full mk-atv-xbmc-ssh. You can usually launch it by double-clicking the file, and assuming you’re connected to the net, everything should run fine. You’ll see a whole lot of command line text scroll by, and a few downloads happening. What it’s doing is grabbing the latest release of the ATV-bootloader, the boot-up tool that makes your Apple TV ready for Boxee, turning into into a Mac-formatted image file that the Apple TV can read, and grabbing a USB Image Tool from HP that can install that Mac image on a USB drive.

Once the command line utility is done, you should see a ‘Disc Image File’ in your atv-win folder–atv-xbmc-ssh—and a new USB Image Tool application. If you haven’t plugged in your USB drive, do so now. XP users need to get into an administrator’s account to launch the USB Image Tool, and Vista/Windows 7 beta users should right-click on the app’s icon and choose ‘Run as Administrator.’ Click in the Image Tool’s upper-left corner and switch it from ‘Volume Mode’ to ‘Device Mode,’ and—for real, here—be sure your portable USB drive is selected, not your backup drive, your iPod, or anything else connected. Even if you don’t have anything you need on the drive, go ahead and hit ‘Backup’ and create an image file, because it makes restoring it after the Apple TV session much easier. Once that’s done, hit ‘Restore,’ navigate to the atv-xbmc-ssh image in the atv-win folder, and hit ‘Open.’ You might get a prompt or two asking if you really want to apply the image, or about other matters, but you’re safe to move forward. When it finishes, you’ve got a drive that’s ready to introduce Apple TV to the wonders of open source.

Mac users: You’ve got it a lot easier. Head over to the ATV USB Creator site, download the latest copy of the Mac creator tool, plug in a portable USB drive, and launch it. You’ll get something that looks a bit like this:

The screenshot may be out of date, but the basic selectors and tools are the same. Select ‘ATV-Patchstic’ for the installation type, and at the bottom, select your USB device. Don’t know its BSD/mounting address? Head to the System Profiler, and look under the USB section. If you haven’t unpacked your Apple TV yet, it’s safe to assume it’s running the newest firmware, so make sure to select it under ‘AppleTV version 2.x.’ If everything looks right, hit ‘Create Using->’, and after a few minutes’ time, you’ve got your stick.

Installing Boxee (and XBMC)

This part’s pretty easy, but if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough in video, check out Boxee’s own patchstick installation guide. Physically unplug your Apple TV, stick the USB drive you just formatted into the slot near the power cord, then plug the Apple TV back in. You’ll know it picked up the drive if you see everyone’s favorite open source penguin, Tux, sitting on an Apple TV. You’ll also see a whole host of text scroll by (squeezy-pictured at right). If it freezes at any point and you see words like ‘failed’ in the text, double-check that you created your USB stick in ‘Device mode’ (for Windows users), and check out the known issues. You’ll see a final line of text informing you it’s okay to restart when it’s done installing, so pull out your USB stick, unplug the Apple TV, then plug it back in.

Boxee isn’t actually installed yet, but the tools to grab it and keep it updated are now installed on your Apple TV’s home menu. Select Launcher from there, head to Downloads, then grab new copies of everything—the Launcher itself, XBMC (which Boxee relies on in part) and Boxee. Don’t hit every button and choose the ‘Downgrade’ option for the launcher, however. Now you’ve really got Boxee installed, so if you haven’t already done so, head to Boxee.net and sign up for an account.

Expanding your Boxee’s mighty powers

Net video: Out of the box, with none of your media loaded in, Boxee on an Apple TV can do a lot of cool stuff. Most everything you need is accessed by using the remote to click over to a sliding left-hand menu. Head there now, choose Video and then Internet, and you’ve got access to clips and full shows from Hulu.com, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, the WB, and Joost, music videos from MTV, clips from YouTube (which, actually, you’ve got in the Apple TV anyways, but Boxee’s interface is easier), and access to free, public feeds. But there’s also ‘My Torrents’ section, which is pretty great indeed.

Video feeds: Remember Gina’s guide to using Miro as your TiVo for net video? Boxee can be the same kind of one-stop shop for everything on the web. They’ve even got a great directory, Miro Guide, that lists the most popular and best-rated stuff out there, like the TED conference talks, Make TV, Adult Swim, and much more. Luckily, you don’t have to type in 80-character URLs with your Apple TV remote; just log into your Boxee account and head to the My RSS section. Paste your feeds in there, and Boxee picks them up the next time you log in. While you’re over there, search and see if any of your friends are Boxee users—their recommendations and recent picks can show up on your home screen, Netflix-style.

Your own stuff, any format: What about your own videos, the stuff you’ve ripped from DVDs, shot yourself on a camcorder, and randomly found lying in the spare closets of the net? You can either share them over your home network and let Boxee grab and stream them, or drop them directly into your Apple TV’s hard drive. For sharing, choose Settings from the left-hand menu, then Media Sources, and Boxee will scan the network for anything that’s easy to pick up. If Boxee instills you with start-fresh spirit, Gizmodo has a great guide to setting up network storage for Macs and PCs.

If you’d rather manually feed your media into Boxee, get your Apple TV’s local IP address from your router’s setup page or the General/Network settings in the standard ATV menu. Using an FTP client that’s capable of SFTP mode (Cyberduck for Macs and Filezilla for PCs are both free and handy), access your Apple TV address with frontrow as both username and password. The directory you land in, /Users/frontrow, has four folders worth noting: Movies, Music, Pictures, and Downloads. Drop the appropriate media in each of the first three, and Boxee should be able to find it there. If not, head to the Media Sources options in Settings and set up /Users/frontrow/Movies and the like as sources. As for Downloads, that’s where the files you tell Boxee to download off your feeds go, so you can pull them off Boxee for use elsewhere.

If Boxee doesn’t recognize your media, choose ‘Browse’ from whatever category (Video, Music, Pictures), pick the file, and you’ll usually get options to Play or Recognize. Hit ‘Recognize,’ and Boxee will search web databases to try and figure out what it is and pull down thumbnails and info. If it doesn’t catch it, you can type in a name and other comma-separated info, and Boxee will refine its search and, 95 percent of the time, hit the nail on the head. What’s truly awesome is that doing that with one video in a series of similarly-named files catalogs them all, and you’ll get a nicely organized shelf-like menu next time you go to play it.

And don’t worry what format—other than DRM-protected files, Boxee can play just about anything, since it uses a similar backend as the Linux-rooted Mplayer (and Linux coders really don’t like not having access, don’t you know).

Torrents, fresh off the net: If you’ve got a pretty good broadband connection and find yourself leaving Boxee on more than off, why not free up your desktop and have the Apple TV do your BitTorrent bidding? Using the same kind of SFTP access described above, jump in and head to Users/frontrow/Library/Application Support/BOXEE/UserData/Torrents. Drop your .torrent files there, and Boxee will start downloading the next time you start it up. You can pause, resume, and throttle each download’s bandwidth from the Download section of the pull-out menu.

More Boxee resources

My fingers would fall off before I get to all the great features Boxee offers on every platform—did I mention Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, podcast support, Last.fm and Shoutcast streaming? I’ll leave the exploring to eager installers, but here’s a few resources I found truly helpful in my own journey into the ATV/Boxee realm:

• iPhone/iPod touch remote control: Especially for Apple TV users, because the on-screen keyboard can get tiresome. This one’s for jailbroken units, but a Boxee rep tells me an official App Store version is on the way.
• Five things you should know if you’re new to Boxee: Covers video size issues, how to name your files for better Boxee recognition, and privacy when watching your media.
• Gizmodo’s own Apple TV/Boxee guide: Because John Mahoney has a nicer TV for screenshots than I do, and for the guide to uninstalling Boxee, should you ever need to.

All that hopefully gets you started on streaming any type of media whenever you want in your living room, and paying a lot less per month for the privilege. Got a Boxee tip or hack not mentioned above? Have your own cable-cutting story to share? Tell us all about it in the comments.

(Via Lifehacker.)

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