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Analisa Wisdom
Boxee was a cross-platform freeware HTPC (Home Theater PC) software application with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV. It enabled its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social network services and interactive media related features.
Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source XBMC (now Kodi) media center software which Boxee used as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
Marketed as the first ever "Social Media Center",[9][10][11] the first public alpha of Boxee was made available on 16 June 2008.[12] The UI design of the Alpha prototype was designed with design firm Method Incorporated, who also created Boxee's brand identity.[13] The first public beta version was officially released for all previously supported platforms on 7 January 2010.[14] Boxee gained the ability to watch live TV on the Boxee Box using a live TV stick in January 2012.[15][16] By the end of 2012 the developers had discontinued all desktop versions and support.
Boxee co-developed a dedicated set-top box (hardware) called "Boxee Box by D-Link" in cooperation with D-Link which was the first "Powered by Boxee" branded device to be announced and launched,[17][18][19][20] as well as a similar media player device called "Iomega TV with Boxee" (available in the UK & Europe) in cooperation with Iomega[21][22] and a 46" high-definition television from ViewSonic with integrated Boxee software.
In July 2013 online media sources revealed Samsung would hire key employees and purchase Boxee's assets for around $30M. Samsung confirmed the acquisition with The New York Times, but did not disclose the amount.[27]
Boxee supported a wide range of popularly used multimedia formats, and it included features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Boxee could play most audio and video file containers, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares.[28][29]
When run on modern PC hardware, Boxee was able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p. Boxee was able to use DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) on Windows Vista and newer Microsoft operating-systems to utilize GPU accelerated video decoding to assist with process of video decoding of high-definition videos.[30][31]
With its Python-powered plugin system, the Boxee software incorporated features such as Apple movie trailer support and subtitle downloading, access to large on-demand video streaming services Netflix, Headweb and Vudu; a range of popular online internet content channels like audio services Pandora Radio, Last.fm, Jamendo, NPR, SHOUTcast radio streams; video services from ABC, BBC iPlayer, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, Funny or Die, Joost, Major League Baseball, NHL Hockey, MTV Music, MySpaceTV, Revision3, MUBI, OpenFilm, SnagFilms, IndieMoviesOnline, EZTakes, United Football League, Vevo, Vice Magazine, TED, The WB Television Network, YouTube[32][33] and image services from Flickr and PicasaWeb picture viewing plugins. All were available as media sources available alongside the local library.[citation needed]
Some of the services were via specialized connections (e.g., YouTube), while the rest were a preselected list of podcast channels for streaming using generic RSS web feeds (e.g., BBC News).[28] Boxee also supported NBC Universal's Hulu quite early on, but in February 2009 was asked by Hulu to remove the service at the request of Hulu's content partners.[34] Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulu's RSS feeds,[35] but Hulu once again blocked access.[36][37]
Even though both the Boxee App and the Boxee Box supported Netflix,[38] the Boxee App supported only a limited instant queue, missing more recent TV shows and movies available through the web browser and iPhone apps.
Boxee was able 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 shipped with a closed source, binary-only, program called "bxflplayer", which was used to load Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight proprietary plugins. This program communicated with the main Boxee process via shared memory and rendered the video onto screen. By using this approach, it was possible for Boxee not only to play Flash Video and Silverlight content that was protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management) but also allowed for the user to control the player using a remote control and other input devices that were more suitable to laid back watching. It was not clear if this way of using "bxflplayer" as closed source libraries with a GPL licensed software passes as GPL linking exception or not.[32]
Boxee source code was otherwise in majority based on the XBMC (now Kodi) media center project's source code which Boxee used as its software framework, and the Boxee developers contributed changes to that part back upstream to the XBMC project.[7][41][42] So Boxee was partially open-source, and those parts were distributed under the GNU General Public License, however Boxee's social networking layer library, "libboxee" was closed source as it dealt with proprietary methods of communication with Boxee's online back-end server which handled the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase. It is not clear if this way of using closed source libraries with a GPL licensed software passed the GPL linking exception or not.[43]
Boxee required registered user accounts, which formed a social network of fellow Boxee users. Users could follow the activity of other Boxee users who were added as friends, and could publicly rate and recommend content. Users could also control what media appear in the activity feed in order to maintain privacy. If a user recommended something that was freely available from an internet content service then Boxee would let others users stream it directly. If a user recommended something that was not freely available then Boxee would try to show metadata, and movie trailers if it was a movie that the user recommended.[28]
The user's friends' Boxee activity feeds were displayed on the user's home screen, as was the user's own recent activity. Internet content was accessed through a sub-menu of each of the video, audio, and photo menu items, such as Video -> "My videos" and Video -> "Internet videos".[28]
In addition Boxee Beta and later had the option of monitoring Twitter and Facebook news feeds to automatically discover links to videos. Boxee would then add those videos to a watch queue in Boxee so they could be later viewed.
Boxee could also export a user's media activity feed to other social networking services such as FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr. Through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr it was possible from those third-party social networking services for a user to choose to post the Boxee activity feed to social networking sites such as Facebook, (through FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr apps for Facebook).
Boxee's "AppBox" app store "App Store" which was a digital distribution service platform that served add-on apps and plug-ins that provide online content to Boxee, the "AppBox" allowed users to download new apps and addons directly from Boxee's GUI. Many of these sources were in high definition and use streaming sites' native flash and Silverlight players. Boxee had extensibility and integration with online sources for free and premium streaming content.
Boxee could stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also included the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also had music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function (not available on the Boxee Box)[44] and many audio-visualizations and screensavers.
Boxee could be used to play most common multimedia containers and formats from a local source, (except those protected by those with DRM encryption). It could decode these in software, or optionally pass-through AC3/DTS audio from movies directly to S/PDIF output to an external audio amplifier or receiver for decoding on that device.[45][46]
The Video Library, one of the Boxee metadata databases, was a key feature of Boxee. It allowed for the automatic organization of a users' video content by information associated with the video files (movies and recorded TV Shows) themselves.
Boxee had the capability to on the fly parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video (IFO/VOB/BUP) files on a hard-drive or network-share, and also ISO and IMG DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives. It also offered software upscaling/upconverting of all DVD-Video movies when outputting them to an HDTV in 720p, 1080i or 1080p.
The Music Library was another key feature of Boxee. It automatically organized the user's music collection by information stored in the music files ID meta tags, such as title, artist, album, genre and popularity.
Early builds of Boxee included a built-in BitTorrent client (not in the Windows version), with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there were also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. The built-in torrent client was later removed. Through Boxee's Python plugin system it was also possible for the end-users to make their own or add unofficial plugins made by third-party persons for other BitTorrent trackers.
The "boxee remote"[47]) was an application released by Boxee Inc. for the Apple Inc. iOS which allowed for remote controlling of an installed and concurrently-active Boxee session on another computer via the iOS' touchscreen user interface. It was approved for the App Store on 16 March 2010.[48]
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