Apple TV: Boxee

November 13th, 2008

One of the applications installed via the ATV USB Creator is Boxee, an “entertainment experience” that pulls in TV shows, music, and photos from all over, via popular sites like Hulu, CNN, CBS, and Last.fm. My primary motivation for installing Boxee was the Hulu content.

To install Boxee on the Apple TV, first get ATV USB creator and make a USB patch stick, which will have Boxee on it. You’ll then need a Boxee login and password, which I got via MG Siegler of VentureBeat (thanks man).

Boxee then appears in your standard Apple TV menu next to XBMC. You may want to choose “Update” to check for a recent version, since the program is still under development. Then select Boxee from the Apple TV menu, enter your login and pass, and check it out.

The Good

• The wealth of content — all free, free, free — is overwhelming. You get the aforementioned Hulu, CBS, YouTube, podcasts from NPR and Revision 3, Last.fm music, movie trailers, and flickr and Picasa photographs. There’s even a “public torrent” section.
• While a bit confusing at first, the UI is generally user friendly. Most of the navigation is done through a “tray” that slides in on the left side when you press the left button.

The Bad

• The Hulu videos were noticeably pixelated with some “jitters,” both inferior to the Netflix / Roku box and the Apple TV. The controls also seem limited to pause and play, with no fast forward or rewind.
• I couldn’t get the CBS videos to play.
• The navigation feels very “deep” because of the amount of content, and it’s easy to forget where you are. For instance, selecting an NPR podcasts requires navigating down six or seven levels. Some thought has been put into alleviating this (recent items are thrown up to a top level), but more would be welcome.
• The application crashed a few times, while searching for local music and switching back to the usual Apple TV interface.
• A lot of the Boxee functionality (streaming content from my Mac, photos) is already done by the Apple TV.
• The Apple TV version of Boxee runs much slower than the OS X application.

Conclusion

Despite my list of issues, Boxee is the first program I’ve installed that makes hacking the Apple TV worthwhile. While the streaming is glitchy and I encountered several rough spots, the depth of content makes it worth tinkering with. It’s like adding an entirely new video store to the Apple TV. And once I got into watching some Hulu videos, the hiccups faded away.

If you’re interested in checking out Boxee on your Mac, there is a desktop program available for Mac OS X.

As mentioned before, installation on your Apple TV is done via ATV USB creator. I wrote about this experience earlier. If that’s not enough, Wired has some step-by-step instructions, and Boxee themselves have provided some nice videos.

Create the USB stick:

Then install Boxee on your Apple TV: