- Boxee
I have a long history of trying to use my computers as the sole entertainment center in my home (skipping a TV set completely) and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s worked out over the years, specially after FrontRow made it’s debut, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. Ideally what I want is a rich full screen interface for my computer (kind of like the way game consoles let you do much more with TVs than simply watch a station), a piece of software allowing me to browse the web from my couch, to check my flickr contacts, watch streaming tv, you name it, I want to fully use my computer without sitting in front of a mouse and keyboard.
Thankfully there is a very promising solution which already lets me do much of what I want, Boxee. A fork of what originally was XMBC (Xbox Media Center) has turned out to be pretty amazing. It’s a cross platform full screen interface for your computer (or tv via apple tv) which not only hooks up to the media stored in your hard drives but it connects to the cloud and let’s you access streaming video from torrents and television networks, music from last.fm, pictures from Flickr and basically anything you can find a feed for. It doesn’t do web browsing just yet, but I’m sure it will, soon enough.
The software is free, there’s a great community around it and it keeps getting better every day. There’s not much else to say about it, it works great and is a dream come true for me and I’m sure many others.