Boxee Beta & Hardware Announcement

Boxee is a free, cross-platform media centre application, based on XBMC. I have been testing it since late 2008 and consider it to be one of the best non-commercial applications available.

The thing that makes Boxee so great, is that the development team listen closely to the community and focus their time adding the extra functionality that people actually want. Anyone is able to download and install the Boxee alpha, which is available on OS X, Windows, Linux and even AppleTV. As Boxee is based on XBMC it already had a fantastic foundation, however, the team have worked hard to go beyond its original design, providing a truly unique experience.

Last night during a Boxee conference in Brooklyn the development team reached a major milestone, proudly unveiling both the Boxee beta and a hardware contract with D-Link to provide the long discussed Boxee Box.

The beta has not yet been made available to the public, but the Boxee development team have released some screenshots to help build the hype. Anyone familiar with the alpha will instantly realise the user interface has been dramatically overhauled and in my opinion is looking better then ever.

The second exciting announcement was the Boxee Box, which is being manufactured by D-Link. Not much is known about the hardware being used, however it has be confirmed that it will playback 1080p video over HDMI. I assume that this means it is probably using the nVidia ION platform. The Boxee team did release a couple of teaser images of what the Box may look like:

The expected price is around $200, although none of the specifics have been confirmed. I just hope it gets released outside the US. To download the alpha now, or to get more details on the beta and the Box head over to the Boxee website.