LincolnBlogs

Long ago, I believe it was, my buddy Joel turned me on to Boxee. Then, it was still in alpha – way alpha in fact. I thought it was a pretty neat idea, but it was rough, for sure, and I could only get it to work on my desktop at the time, and my desktop had dual monitors, so it looked like hell spread across them. I also recall it being slightly difficult to use.

Fast forward to last night. While on the TechShow, someone mentioned Boxee and I remembered that I had used it long ago and decided to check it out again. This time I tried to install it on my laptop (the same one I had tried it on originally) and it installed just fine on top of Mint 7 (even though the .deb was for Ubuntu 9.10).

WOW. It sure has come a log way baby. The interface is slick, smooth, quick and very attractive. The keyboard use, although it could be more intuitive, is very easy to figure out, and the same for mouse usage (or touchpad in my case). I pointed Boxee at my media folders on my NAS and within an hour (I have a LOT of media) it had scanned through all my stuff. But that’s not the best part…. To my amazement, it looked up all kinds of cover art and information on the files it found. I have to say it was pretty cool scrolling through my tv shows, movies and music with a nice graphical interface.

I haven’t had a great deal of time to play with it yet, just an hour or so last night, but my intention is to fire this sucker up over the weekend with a big old playlist and hook it to my new TV and see what happens. Perhaps between then and now I can get my wife to put the music portion through it’s paces too. I also still need to check out some other features on there as well, like RSS feeds and trying to play an actual dvd. From what I have see so far, I am sure it will perform admirably.