Well it’s about damn time. Miami Hustle is back after a layoff so long we wondered if it would ever grace our computer monitors, tablets, celluar devices or even your big screen TV if you have a clever little device like D-Link’s Boxee Box. If you don’t know what Boxee is, let me explain it to you: Boxee started as a cross platform freeware developed a few years ago to make your PC into a media hub. Let’s go further.
From Wikipedia: Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee now uses as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.
Another interesting aspect is how Boxee manages to play Adobe Flash content from sites such as YouTube and Hulu, and display HTML5 or Silverlight content from such web-based services such as HBO Go and Netflix. Boxee seems to be shipping with a closed source, binary-only, program called “bxflplayer“, which seems to load Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight proprietary plugins. This program communicates with the main Boxee process via shared memory and it renders the video onto screen. By using this approach, it is possible for Boxee not only to play Flash Video and Silverlight content that is protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management) but also allows for the user to control the player using a remote control and other input devices that are more suitable to laid back watching. Same as with the above mentioned “libboxee“, it is not clear if this way of using “bxflplayer” as closed source libraries with a GPL licensed software passes as GPL linking exception or not.
Now for roughly like, a $100, you can buy Boxee ‘powered’ hardware that will hook up pain free to your TV. D-Link (there’s a chance they made your router) created the first widely available piece of hardware and it’s pretty awesome. Straight up: AC power, HDMI, maybe an ethernet cord if you don’t go wireless and you’re done. It’s great. I use it for everything, including Netflix and watching LayzieTheSavage’s Youtube videos.I know what you’re going to say: ‘I can use my Xbox for that’, well you have to pay for your Xbox, baby. Boxee gives it to you for free, and I think it’s higher quality than the Xbox Youtube and Netflix respectively.
Most importantly: Now I can use my Boxee Box to watch, Juan Carlos Faraldo, Jorge Masvidal and all the usual Miami Hustle suspects in their ATT glory. Now if only Boxee Box would get Jorge Masvidal’s manager to stop hating us for talking to Jeff Monson about mushrooms.
Boxee supports the following formats:
• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs (including DVD-Video, VCD/SVCD and Audio-CD/CDDA)
• Container formats: AVI, MPEG PS, MPEG TS, ASF, FLV, Matroska, QuickTime, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3GP, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS
• Video formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (SP and ASP), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), Huffyuv, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak,
• Audio formats: AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA.
• Digital picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer
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