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I left the LinuxMCE core/hybrid and didn’t assemble the new one yet. So, I use my laptop or old desktop to watch movies. With desktop is everything fine. It run Kubuntu 0804 and I installed there Boxee - nice looking, social media center software. But there is Fedora 9 on my laptop and Boxee doesn’t offer binaries for it. There is an only one way to install Boxee from the source.

I found nice tutorial which explains how to install XBMC on Fedora 9. Since Boxee is based on XBMC I tried to use it to build Boxee. But without luck. By some reason the xbmc.bin wasn’t created.

Then I tried to build XBMC using recommendations from that tutorial. Finally I did it. XBMC is run under Fedora 9 without any problems. Will try to build Boxee again as well. Maybe the second time will be successful.

UPDATE: Finally I built Boxee under Fedora 10 (for 9 should be the same). The trick is that. Instead of running make install after make finishes the script make-boxee.sh should be run. I didn’t adjust it for Fedora 10 and it gave me a lot of warnings. But as result I was able run Boxee successfully.

UPDATE2: There is a problem with Boxee under Fedora 10. Instead of playback I see the fast-forward. Also Boxee crashes with Segmentation Fault very often. Will try to build with the fresh sources tonight.

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That short video presentation demonstrates all features of social media center Boxee in action. Enjoy!

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Recently a new alpha version of software for media centers Boxee has been released. Following new features were implemented in the version:

• manual editing of (un)identified movies/tv shows/albums;
• manual adding of a source;
• added mms:// and UPnP support;
• OSD for pictures;
• updated source management;
• bug-fixes.

A full Changelog and system requirements can be found here.

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Finally I got invitation to test the first “social” media center Boxee. Installation under Kubuntu 8.04 was pretty simple. I just added Boxee repository and install it using apt-get. After running the Boxee it automatically found media content in the standard Linux directories - Pictures, Videos and Music. It tried to guess the names of movies by their filenames and get information from IMDB. For those video files which weren’t be recognized cover were created using some frame from movies themselves.

The user interface looks pretty nice. It’s intuitive and allows to easily navigate by media files, control playback movies and music. It’s easy to specify new media source. Doesn’t matter where it is - on local PC or on some network share. Moreover, using Boxee it possible to listen Internet radio, which becomes very popular this time.

However the most interesting and original feature of Boxee is its social component. It allows to people find friends and share between them info about what they watch or listen (be careful with adult content ;)). Additionally they can rate or recommend movie or song. The very basic social feature is offered by Facebook add-in for Windows Media Center. But, for sure, Boxee is much better.

I heard an opinion about competition between Boxee and MythTV. Maybe in the future but currently Boxee don’t support PVR functionality at all. Taking into account that XBMC also misses LiveTV I can conjecture that Boxee won’t have it in the future. In any case, Boxee is good media center software integrated with social service. Will see its progress.

P. S. I can send the invitation somebody who’d like to play with Boxee. Just leave a comment here.

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