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.

Introducing HandBrake 0.94

HandBrake is a free, cross-platform video encoder, that in my opinion has been the best available since Techspansion stopped making VisualHub. Today, the HandBrake development team released version 0.94, with over 100 new features.

The top five new features are:

x264 Optimisations - Improvements from the x264 project, which offer the holy grale of video encoding, "better picture quality, at a smaller size, faster."

64bit - A new Handbrake engine allows the development team to easily compile builds in 32bit and 64bit. Early reports say the 64bit version is approximately 10% faster the existing 32bit version.

Soft Subtitles - HandBrake can now include subtitle tracks that can be turned on and off, instead of always being locked on.

Live Preview - Live preview is an enhancement on the existing preview option, it enables you test your Handbrake settings before starting a full encode.

Constant Quality - HandBrake has migrated to quality-based encoding. This means that instead of telling encoders to use a specific size and vary quality to meet it, they tell the encoder to vary size to meet a given quality level. This change results in significant quality improvements.

They have also made some tweaks to the user interface, offering more practical presets:

 To try HandBrake out for yourself, head over to the development team's download page.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Available

Mozilla has unleashed Firefox version 3.6 on to the world. The beta can now be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and/or Linux.

The most significant change is to Gecko, the layout engine used by Firefox, which has been upgraded to version 1.9.2. This brings support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies as well as performance improvements. Other new features include:

• Users can now change their browser's theme with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.

There are no significant user interface changes in Firefox 3.6.

One visual upgrade that is noticeable is the introduction of personas which allows for simple theme switching. Head over to Mozilla Labs for hundreds of examples.

Overall Firefox 3.6 looks like it will be a good upgrade, offering better compatibility with modern web technologies, more speed and simpler customisation. Although still in beta, the release appears to be very stable and I would expect a short run before it is officially released. Head over to the Mozilla developers community to download the beta now.

VLC Finally Hits Version 1.0

The free, open source and cross-platform media player, VLC has finally hit version 1.0. In my opinion VLC is the best media player on the market and since its release in February 2001 has been downloaded more then 100 million times.

VLC is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Windows, OS X, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Sharp Zaurus. It also has support for just about every media file format you can throw at it.

With version 1.0 many new features have been added, these include:

• Free, open source and cross-platform
• Independent of systems codecs to support most video types
• Live recording
• Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
• Finer speed controls
• New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0)
• New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS) and major improvements in many formats...
• New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
• Video scaling in full screen
• RTSP Trickplay support
• Zipped file playback
• Customizable toolbars
• Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
• Better integration in Gtk environments
• MTP devices on linux
• AirTunes streaming
• New skin for the skins2 interface

All information is taken from the VLC Wiki.

To download your copy of VLC head over to VideoLAN.org.

Spotify - A World of Music (For Free)

Want to listen to all the latest music legally and for free?

Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming program that looks similar to iTunes. It allows for instant listening of over 6 million tracks with almost no buffering delay. It’s available for Windows, OS X and Linux (through WINE) and in the UK is 100% free.

Spotify has a wide range of music from all the major record labels. Music can be found by searching for artists, songs, albums or just keywords. You can create custom playlists that will be synchronised to your Spotify account, meaning if you install Spotify on multiple computers your music will automatically be available. Playlists can also be collaborative, allowing your friends to listen to your music and even add new songs to the playlist, all in real time.

To make Spotify free there are a couple of limitation, firstly it is not possible to save the songs or play them outside the Spotify application. Also Spotify has both audio and visual advertisements, however these ads are generally non-intrusive. For example audio ads only occur every 30 minuets of listening and are no longer then 15 seconds long; they will also never play during the middle of a song.

To see Spotify in action check out the video below:

To start listening to music right now go download spotify.