Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it.  And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino.  We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then. Now there is a new version of Apple TV coming out and the Boxee Box is launching in November. We think people want to be able to watch anything that they can watch on their computer, only on their bigscreen TV.  There is an overwhelming consumer expectation that the content we can consume in our cubicles, our dorm rooms, and in our laps should be available in our living rooms, in full 1080p with a gorgeous interface.  It’s a simple premise, but the challenge is to do it in a way that makes sense in that space, so you can put your feet up, grab a remote and start watching. No keyboards, mice, windows or labyrinthine menus. It should be calm and it should be beautiful. And it must be open. We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms.  We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want. We think it’s worth it.

switching to Google Nexus One was easy, once I discovered SqueezeCommander to remote-control my SqueezeBox. For EUR 3,- it does everything iPeng does on the iPhone, including support for SqueezeBox apps & multi-player & -server-support. searching large libraries of music seems faster than on the iPhone. but the best thing: it can download single tracks or whole albums from the SqueezeServer to your phones’ SD-card – in your face, iTunes!
http://www.squeezecommander.com (or search the Android market)

We have released a new version of the Boxee Beta (0.9.20.10708). It is actually 37 days later, but I just really wanted to use that title for the blog post… Since releasing the Beta we have seen significant uptake in usage. Some stats:

150,000 new users joined Boxee 3 million Boxee apps launched 1.5 million TV episodes and Movies were watched

The new version of the Beta includes almost no new features, but rather is focused on bug fixes. We focused on stability issues. Many hangs and crashes were identified and resolved. We spent a bunch of time trying to improve the never-ending saga of handling SMB shares. All-in-all, more than 500 issues have been resolved. We could not have done it without the amazing feedback users are giving us. With the Boxee Beta, we have expanded our Early Access list to tens of thousands of users.  This Early Access list has developed into a very active community of testers reporting bugs in great detail on http://jira.boxee.tv. The community has helped us focus on the most important issues and identified points where Boxee needs some TLC. Here are some of the things that kept us busy:

Multilingual keyboard support: under settings->appearance->region to add keyboards Significantly improved video quality of our DXVA support Regained support for older graphics cards (pre-2.0 pixel shader) which was broken after move to DXVA Improved file scanning performance Hardware acceleration of H.264 on Intel HD4500 cards Hang on FLAC tag read over SMB SMB crashes when canceling SMB operations Hang on shutdown due to wait for SMB and file scanner Hang in file scanner when manually scanning a folder Hangs due to excessive locks around database pool Hangs when left idle due to UDP sockets leak Corrupted graphics on some ATI cards (X1600) Log file cycling (every 32M, old log overrides boxee.old.log) Present action dialog when clicking on DVD icon to allow browse/eject Optimization to file scanning making it less IO intensive Fixes to iPhone remote keyboard under Linux Added support for m4b playback (audio books) Crash in ID3 tag reading (playback and background scanning of some mp3 files) Crash in some wav files which contained extra-info in the wav header (playback and background scanning) Crash on some rss feeds caused by mis-parsing of empty http headers Crash on image extraction from mp3 tags (in some cases) win32: fixed runtime error in some cases where vc90 runtime was not installed properly Dual screen issues. sometimes a movie would only show black screen when switching screens. Allow apps to define properties for rtmp streaming Playback of some internet video streams, mainly coming from playlists (partial read of the network buffer was causing wrong codec detection) Playlist playback of internet video streams was sometimes using the music player instead of the video player Playback of music from history (was not working and now it will open the folder played from) Logout was broken enabling logging-in even after password change (was using stored cookie) Win32: when launching boxee while another instance is running it will just bring the other instance to front

Download the new version from http://www.boxee.tv/download and help us continue to improve! One thing that remains not addressed is AppleTV support for our Beta. Unfortunately, as AppleTV support was not created by us, we have no control or insight when, if ever, it will be fixed. That said.. For the adventurous, JimWiley & hillbilly1980 have worked on a step-by-step guide for getting your AppleTV running Boxee Beta. Let them know how you like it

This one should immediately show up on my Buzz-feed…

…this should immediatly post to: http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/topic-details?hub.url=http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/feed

Google Buzz Air Desktop-Client (Download) – very simple, basically just the mobile web-page Chrome Buzz – browser extension f. Chrome, basically just shows your feed, nothing more Buzzer – shares a webpage through Google Reader on your Buzz-account Share-Bookmarklet – does the same as above, but through a bookmarklet which works on all browsers.  in both cases you have to add your Google Reader as a connected site in Buzz Google Buzz ER – A WordPress-plugin for displaying your Buzz-feed anywhere on your blog Sharing-Buttons with counter like Mashable is using – not sure how to implement these

got some more?

while you’re waiting for Facebook to release their HipHop for PHP over on github, you might wanna watch this video having engineer Haiping Zhao giving a detailled introduction about the way HipHop transforms PHP-code into C++.

as an avid Squeezebox-user, I’ve no idea how I could have missed this gem for so long: iPeng lets you use our iPhone to control your Squeezbox (or boxes, if you’ve several spread across the house). hands down the best way to browse a large local music-library or subscription-services napster & rhapsody [which of course both are not available in austria ]. the app goes for EUR 8,-, compared to the EUR >1.000,- you’ld spend for a Sonos that’s a boon

had some fun toying with Google Goggles this morning. Goggles uses your phone’s camera to do image-based search for products, landmarks, media, shops etc. the results I was getting for products & books are pretty accurate. most impressive: I snapped the artwork (no text, title at all) of a german, medical text-book – first result was the correct link to Amazon. looking forward to test this outdoors, where Goggles is also using GPS & compass to refine results. ps: if you can’t find Googles in the Android Marketplace, make sure you’re running Android 1.6 Donat or higher! if you’re stuck with an G1 like me, you might take the chance to root your phone and upgrade to CyanogenMod…

We are very excited to unveil the Boxee Beta. It is a big step in the evolution of Boxee, but rather than bore you with sentimental prose about how the path we took to get here, I wanted to dive right into what’s new with the Beta release. Home Screen:

We’ve completely re-designed the home screen to make it easier to navigate to your favorite content. We’ve pulled the menu out from the side and put it front and center. Below is your hub for recommendations and content; See recommendations from friends on boxee, Facebook or Twitter (Feed), recommendations from Boxee’s staff and partners (Featured) and the latest episodes from your favorite shows or things you’ve saved for later (Queue). Global Menu:

This is one of our favorite additions to the Beta – the global menu. This menu makes it easy to access helpful resources (TOP – Logout, Settings, Queue, Feed, History), the main menu (MIDDLE – Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps, Files) and shortcuts (BOTTOM) to your favorite Apps, TV Shows, Movies, or folders. TV Shows & Movies:

We overhauled Movies and TV shows to include both Internet and local content; If you know what it is you want to watch, we’ll show you where you can find it and start playing it immediately – no need to go through an App. Not sure what you’re in the mood for, we’ve made it easy to browse a ton of popular movies from the Internet by selecting the Movie library. We’ve put a special focus on TV Shows to better organize what you can watch. Boxee now organizes TV shows by season and episode, and let’s you filter by whether freely available or not, so once you’ve seen all the free episodes you can decide if that DVD is worth it. Queue:

The Boxee Queue is a list that you control and manage. You can put almost anything into your Queue, a movie, a TV show episode, an Internet stream, a local file. In addition, if you added your favorite TV shows into My Shows then new episodes will automatically be added to your Queue. Unwatched items will appear in bold, white font. Applications:

We have made it easy for you to find and test new apps. You can sort by popularity or browse the newest additions to the Boxee App Library. Clicking on App will let you choose whether you’d like to run it, add it to My Apps (the list of your favorite apps) or add it as a Shortcut. We also made it easier to add and browse 3rd party App repositories. Sharing:

We have made it easier to share what you are watching and also let you put your own custom message, which will be sent to your Boxee, Twitter and Facebook followers. Getting the best out of your Windows machine:

As part of the Beta we also changed the underlying graphic library on Windows from OpenGL to DirectX, and we’re now taking advantage of DXVA, which means Boxee for Windows just got faster and can play 1080p without your CPU breaking a sweat. There is now a long list of affordable Windows-based devices that can turn into a kick-ass media center (e.g. Acer Revo, Dell Zino, HP Mini) Lots and lots of other stuff:

Bug fixes Performance improvements Official support for Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic

We plan to open up the Beta to the public on Jan 7th (at CES). Over the next 4 weeks we will gradually release invitations to our early access users (you can add your name to the early access list here) and then to existing alpha users. We hope your testing will help us identify any major issues and resolve them by the time of our public release. Thank you all for your on going support!!

Sony has a fun little Facebook-app that lets you post auto-tuned audio-status-updates to your wall the best thing to happen since the T-Pain iPhone app.

We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device. I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

We will show mockups of the box and share more details at our upcoming Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, NY on Dec 7th. RSVP here. Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations. We are building Boxee as a platform that would:

make it easy for users to consume and find content – no matter what the source give content owners, aggregators, and developers the tools to create unique experiences with a variety of business models enable CE companies to enhance their Connected devices

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc. Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room. We are very excited about the partnership and looking forward to sharing more at the event.

trying out the new Xbox Zune video-marketplace, which is only available within the Xbox Live Update Preview-program for now. there are only few select movies available for the preview, even fewer in 1080p HD & 5.1 audio  (Matrix Revolutions, Watchmen). movies come both as on-demand streaming & download for 490 microsoft points or EUR 5,70, HD (SD movies come at EUR 2,80) – not exactly cheap…

just a few screenshots from the pending Xbox LIVE Update, which will include access to Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm & Zune marketplace. I couldn’t find Last.fm in the preview, but Facebook & Twitter really works well… if you want to be considered for upcoming Xbox preview-programs (this one seems to be closed down), sign up here!

1) download and install the wonderful Wavr-Plugin by Lucas Caro 2) the plugin version 0.2 includes hardcoded URLs to the Wave-sandbox (wave.google.com/a/sandbox) – if you want to use it with Wave production (wave.google.com), edit wavr.php and replace “http://wave.google.com/a/sandbox/” with “http://wave.google.com/wave/” on line 109 3) create a new post or page and include a snippet like this: [ wave id="WAVE-ID" height="500" bgcolor="#000000" color="#FFFFFF" ] 4) while the sanbox included a handy debug-menu, on production you’ll have to look into the sourcecode to find out the Wave-ID (imho). in firefox, mark the wave-items in your inbox and right-click “view source”. look out for a token like googlewave.com!w+Gl6GGfYIC – that’s the ID. if everything goes right, the integrated Wave will look something like this (only visible to users currently logged in to their Wave-account, obviously):

no secret, I have a soft spot for websites advancing music-charts on the web. being based on sources like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and even P2P-Networks current traffic, We are hunted gives charts a social twist. great site, but I keep forgetting its URL, hence this blog-post

ps: of course there’s also still charts.fm, where we’ve added Facebook Connect and a handy Facebook-sharing tool recently…

It’s been a while since Twitter discontinued SMS-notification for most users outside the US. there have been plenty of replacements, all of which shared the downside of coming at an additional cost per SMS/Tweet. enter Twe2, which was launched a few weeks ago and is the first 100% free, ad-supported SMS-notification-service I’ve come around. Twe2 cuts off the last 25 characters of your tweet and replaces it with an ad (currently the only ad they’re running is for Wadja, some strange mobile community-thing sporting a blue kangaroo as their logo). fair enough, esp. since there’s an option to split the whole tweet into 2 SMS. besides the ad, Twe2 is even better than the original SMS-notification, as it not only allows you to get your direct-messages and replies, but also gives you the ability to monitor any term on the public timeline (think search.twitter.com -> SMS). this great feature compensates for some bugs, like encoding-problems with special characters (like the @-sign ) and delay of SMS-forwarding which can be up to 15min. http://twe2.com - Blog

Austria’s original, privately held TV-station ATV launched their new video-portal into private beta just yesterday. the ambitious goal: to mesh their very own on-air content with user-generated video, therefor building ‘Austria’s answer to YouTube’ (my interpretation) while bridging the gap between on-air & on-line. the strong emphasize on geo-location of users & videos might add an additional edge over established video-communites.  if you want to be among the first to try out beta.atv.at, just drop me a comment, I’ve some invites left! Bonus: If you look really hard, you might find a totally embarrasing clip of yours truly impersonating german Schlager-star Heino (and no, the video is not linked to my account)

just in time for the weekend, here’s yet another mashup I’ve been working on lately. I guess the claim says it all: Tweetshirt - Your Tweet on a T-Shirt! (http://tweetshirt.me)
it’s pretty self-explanatory, just enter your Twitter-username, and choose the tweet you want printed on a shirt from your recent & favorite tweets. you may also enter the URL of an arbitrary tweet (i.e. http://twitter.com/darthvader/status/12… - you have to copy&paste the URL by clicking on the timestamp displayed in the Twitter-web-interface). the tweet including your avatar-image is pre-rendered and sent to TShirt.AG and/or Zazzle via their respective APIs. I recommend trying both services, as they differ in offered shirts, colours, shipping-cost etc. btw, working with those APIs is pretty easy, so if you’ve got other ideas for automated mass-customization of T-Shirts, I’ld suggest to check those out! big thanks go to Tina Fleck for the lovely screendesign, which she provided within amazingly short time! also, thanks all for retweeting this, I hope you’re having fun with Tweetshirt!

this post is part of Ritchie’s blog carneval ‘Best & Worst Gadget 2008′ (or ‘Bestes / übelstes Hardware Gadget 2008′, if you prefer german), which is about to end today - so if you want to join, better hurry up! in 2008 I finally settled to buy a new TV-set for my living room. not  being the decisive kind of guy (+a serious lack of knowledge), it took me weeks over weeks to decide on brand & model. most people I’ve talked to recommended Samsung & Phillips for their superior image-optimization features, but even within these two brands there’s plenty of options. at the end I got a Phillips 42PFL9732D set, 42″, 100Hz (which should really improve quality), Full HD (which makes not too much sense, living in Austria where PAL still rules the cable). but what really makes it stand out is ‘Ambilight’, a gimmick found in many of Phillip’s top-of-the-line models. Ambilight projects a colorful & dynamically responsive halo on the wall behind the TV-set. while definitely enhancing the viewing-experience (esp. in darkened rooms) , this also lends your TV a shrine-like appearance

after almost a year of usage I’m still pretty satisifed with the Phillips. sometimes it’s pushing too hard when auto-scaling & -zooming non-16:9 content to the screens dimensions (it does so by increasingly zooming at the images borders, which introduces a strange 3D-like-effect), but of course that can be turned off. on digital inputs (which it has plenty of), image quality is really great. speaking of digital inputs, since most of the video content I consume is downloaded or streamed over the intertubes anyway, a TV set for me only makes sense when combined with some sort of streaming media client. my XBox 360 would do the job, but is damn noisy and way to restricted in terms of codec-support. buying a dedicated Apple Mac Mini seemed like the best solution. the Mini is super-silent so it can keep running all the time, and using media center software Boxee allows to not only playback content from your harddrive or LAN, but also streams video from populare websites like YouTube, Last.fm or Hulu (the latter of course only in the US of A). all of that functionality is conveniently controlled with the minimalist Apple Remote.  to round things off, I wanted to get a wireless keyboard with integrated trackpad. while the Mini primarily is used for media playback, it sure would be nice to shoot off the odd mail or tweet while on the couch… after failing attempts of finding a Mac-sepcific keyboard, I opted for a Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard. very cool looking brushed chrome, slim, nice charging-station & Startrek-esque volume-controls (sliding your finger over a row of LEDs). however, while the keyboard itself is quite good, the trackpad’s quality is just ridiculous. moving the mouse-pointer is slow, inaccurate and hard-going - and even after months of usage you can’t get used to it. diNovo Edge - fail! besides the diNovo-disaster I’m quite satisfied with my revamped media-setup. for consuming both local and online video, the Mini and Boxee are a great team I can recommend wholeheartedly. now if only I’ld find a decent wireless keyboard/trackpad-combo…