Smart Home Blog

Boxee team officially confirmed LiveTV feature. It’ll be available in January 2012 for US and Canada users Boxee Box only. PC version of Boxee won’t have such possibility. Also there is a clear explanation that PVR (Personal Video Recorder) functionality won’t be available. It’ll be truly Live TV without recording or pausing.

The main goal of LiveTV on Boxee Box is to replace many devices by only one and to bring a competitor of existing cable boxes and services. Boxee promises a good range of channels with reasonable price. And it’ll be really cool advantage to existing Boxee features – playback various media types from different sources and integration with online media and social services. Also Boxee Box LiveTV looks much better then any GoogleTV box.

As I already mentioned, the LiveTV will be available in January 2012. But LiveTV USB stick can be pre-ordered even now.

Looks like Boxee is going to add PVR functionality very soon. It’ll use USB TV tuner to allow Boxee users watch, schedule, pause Live TV as well as navigate via EPG. Social features will be also available for that kind of media content. You’ll be able to share your favorite TV shows with your Boxee or Facebook friends.

XBMC which was and is a base for Boxee still doesn’t have PVR support. There is a way to watch and record live TV using VDR (yaVDR) or MythTV (MythBox). But it’d be nice to have a native PVR functionality. Let’s see how it’ll be implemented in Boxee. The PVR release should be launched soon. But now let’s watch a short demo video of Live TV setup under the Boxee after break.
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Today a final version of LinuxMCE-VDR integration was officially announced. Main achievement of that release is possibility to watch different channels on the different media directors (before it was possible to watch one channel to all MDs). Additionally the stability of VDR and support of remote controls (especially MCE remote) were improved.

Pre-compiled binaries for 32- and 64-bit are available here. Inside archive you can find README file explained the process of installation of packages.

UPDATED: According to information from the LinuxMCE forum developers cleaned VDR sources. So, now original VDR source can be used to build its plug-ins.