Boxee Media Centre
Posted: July 4th, 2009 | Tags: Boxee, Hacking | 5 Comments »
Boxee Media Centre
Originally uploaded by mackers
A few months ago I decided to build a new media server from the bottom up. I needed something to sit in the living room and be able to play and stream music and videos.
It’s in the living room, so it has to be quiet and, as it will be turned on all the time it has to be relatively green. It also has to look good so I chose the very quiet Antec Fusion Black 430 chassis. For the hard drive I went for a 1TB WD Caviar Green. Again, almost silent and very energy efficient. I made sure the graphics card had a HDMI out and I accessorized with a DVD burner, TV Tuner card, WiFi and a remote control.
As I’m running linux on a new model, configuration was arduous, but I now have the remote control, volume knob and LCD display working nicely.
For the software, I’m running Boxee (on Ubuntu). Whilst still in Alpha, its mostly stable and looks very slick indeed.
I’m delighted with the final result. It’s a PC, but looks spiffy tucked there under the TV. I unplugged the keyboard/mouse; all interaction is via the IR remote (or the Boxee iPhone app).
Some highlights:
- 1TB is plenty of storage, but with Boxee having integrated bittorrent downloads, this will probably fill up fast. However, there’s loads of online content available through the interface. Boxee also has support for showing Photos (local, flickr, facebook).
- I can run emulators, games and things like Google Earth on the box. (Google Earth looks incredible on the HDTV!)
- I’m running mpd on the machine so I can play music without turning the TV on (via the MPoD iPhone app).
- The new version of the above app also allows me to stream music to my iPhone. This is especially cool, I can stream my music to my iPhone wherever I am (even over 3G).
- Boxee has mad social networking support, so if I recommend a movie or whatever through the interface it gets tweeted to my account.
- I also have mt-daapd running to stream to iTunes.
All-in-all very sweet, but I’m going to the beach now.
All in all a fine piece of work sir. I’d love to be able to output my laptop onto the telly. *googles PCMCIA video cards*
You need a bigger TV Dave :)
I’ve got the Silver Antec Fusion, but access all my media over a homeplug interface stored on my mega Debian storage device.
I’m using a Toshiba all in one wireless keyboard, and its pretty good.
Haha. I actually have a bigger TV, but it’s not HD.
One of the nice features of Boxee is a nice network browser. Can access media on any box on the network.
Hey Mackers,
Sounds pretty cool.
I’ve just got myself one of those Acer Aspire Revo boxes with ION graphics and installed xubuntu and boxee.
I like the look of it but I want to make the dodgy torrent downloading as easy as the rest of the interface. Even if I queued up torrents from work or whatever that’d probably be grand. How would you recommend going about this? I think all I need is a free rss hosting service with a firefox add on or bookmarklet that can post to this rss. I could probably even use something like http://conorboxee.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Would that work?
I know that from xubuntu I can just save torrents to a specific Boxee directory and it’ll pick them up for download and then move them off to another dir when completed, but I’d like to avoid ever taking out my wired keyboard etc. for the Revo.
Cheers,
Duff
Sweet.
I ended up running uTorrent in the background watching an RSS feed of links that I had bookmarked in delicious. To add a torrent I just have to add a bookmark in Firefox using the delicious extension.
This might also be useful: http://flexget.com/