Social media center Boxee comes to Windows

The Boxee developers have announced the launch of a new public alpha for Windows of their cross-platform open media center with social networking and community features. Boxee is a fork of the XBMC Media Center that includes several customised additions, including Web 2.0 services integration with Twitter, Tumblr and Digg, as well as major audio, video and photo portal integration (such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, Shoutcast, Flickr and Picasa). Boxee also includes a BitTorrent client so users can easily download media over the web from within the application. Users can add extra functionality through App Box, an add-on App Store that lets users select and install a variety of new applications and plug-ins.

Boxee lets users see what their friends have been watching. Boxee's developers refer to it as a social media centre and one of Boxee's best features, aside from the innovative user interface, is the inclusion of its own social community. Users can see what their friends are watching and listening to via an online Web feed or directly inside of the application. Once installed, the home screen shows a list of content suggested by friends, their activities and even their newly added content. Users can also use the popular micro-blogging service Twitter or FriendFeed to automatically share what they're watching or listening to, with the rest of the world.

The latest version of Boxee now includes several stability and performance improvements, an updated user interface and 1080p support for Ubuntu users with an NVIDIA card that supports VDPAU. In order to download and use the software, users must first create a Boxee account. Boxee is available for Windows XP, Vista, Mac OSX (Intel Only) and Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 & 9.04). According to the Boxee blog post, the beta of Boxee for Windows is expected to be available "later this year". Parts of Boxee are released under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and other parts, including the libboxee networking layer library, are closed source.

(crve)