Phil Long's blog – Teletranone

I’ve little to talk about of interest for this past week, but one thing I have been playing with are a couple of options for a better media experience on my AppleTV.

As you may recall, I signed up for the Boxee Alpha a few weeks ago; well, this week I finally got my invite and proceeded to set up a USB patchstick to install the launcher for Boxee. What I didn’t know at the time of sign-up is that the patchstick also installed an XBMC option. Installation itself was pretty simple, using the software and guide provided at the following page: ATVUSB Creator

A bit of advice; once you’ve completed this process go to ‘Update’ and update the XBMC/Boxee launcher application first – as that will allow you to download the latest versions of both Boxee and XBMC.

To use Boxee you’ve got to have a login; which means being accepted on to the alpha. Go to the Boxee website to sign-up. The good news of course is that if you just want to use XBMC no sign-up is necessary, and while the AppleTV version is in Beta, it’s far more developed than Boxee. That said the Boxee concept is far more appealing.

First impressions of Boxee

Well, for starters I quite like the look of the interface, though I do find it’s a little slow to respond to inputs from the AppleTV remote, but that’s a minor niggle.

It looks like it’s got a lot of promise – it includes plugins that talk to Last.fm, so you can play music from that, or share details of what you’ve listened to from your own collections via Last.fm. It comes with access to a number of streaming services – though the only one I’ve seriously looked at is Comedy Central – where I’ve watched a bit of Drawn Together and Futurama.

Boxee is actually based on XBMC, so the plug-ins for that are supposed to work on Boxee. The one that really appeals to me, however, doesn’t work – the BBC iPlayer plugin.

Boxee is a lot nicer in terms of indexing content than XBMC – probably more along the lines of Plex (another fork off from XBMC, specific to Leopard; hence why there’s no AppleTV version – the version of OS X on the AppleTV is based on Tiger). I did have initial problems with it remembering what it had indexed – but today I updated again and it’s been happier since – though that update did disable the remote in XBMC, until I updated XBMC again.

I suppose really it’s not genuinely ‘first impressions’. I’ve known about XBMC for years (on it’s home, of course, the original X-Box) and used it as a few friends have it. I’m not a big fan of the interface – it does strike me as rather clunky and it’s not the friendliest thing to use in terms of finding content. Boxee definitely looks far more promising on that front.

That said, it is quicker responding to remote inputs and it’s clearly a lot more developed than the alpha Boxee. I’ve tested a few MKVs on both Boxee and XBMC – and juttered while they and the sound went horribly out-of-sync on Boxee, XBMC played them fine on the AppleTV.

I also had considerably more success with the iPlayer plug-in on XBMC; though it does only run in a window and I suspect it’s only accessing the lower (iPhone) quality version of content. If I could get it full screen that would be a major win. I’ve also downloaded and installed the ITV Catch-up plugin, but I’ve yet to play with that (is there actually anything worth watching on ITV? You’re not allowed to answer X-Factor; keep that hideous vice to yourselves! ). One point on the iPlayer plugin is that I found settings on Boxee to change to the Wii source – not sure where that would be located on XBMC, as perhaps that will be the higher quality streams the Beeb now makes available.

I hate Samba on OS X

A bit problem I encountered was Mac OS X’s implementation of Samba shares; for some reason beyond my comprehension it doesn’t allow the sharing of external drives. I have a 500GB external drive attached via Firewire 800 that contains all my media and unfortunately I can’t access it via SMB from XBMC or Boxee. On XBMC there is the option of FTP access, which may well solve this problem. Boxee however appears to be limited to SMB only. I’ve been in to terminal and attempted to trick OS X in to thinking the external drive is just a normal drive by playing with smb.conf – no joy. Perhaps more digging will come up with a more promising option – but I’m just not too keen on having to mess about.

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