I’m quite (nerdly) excited about it – having finally moved from an AppleTv as my primary source for video, to a MacMini that I won from an Ebay Auction last week – which incidentally was a local sale, so I was able to pick it up, and not pay shipping charges. Nice.

Obviously, my media software of choice is Boxee, and was the first piece of software that I installed on it. Right now, here’s what my setup looks like (i’ll illustrate it a little better in a coming post):

32″ Toshiba LCD – wall mounted (mounted on the wall makes me feel fancy)
Dlink DNS323 – as my primary harddrive (networked)
Dlink DIR-615 – as our router in the house (its a cheap router, but has wireless N, which is nice)
PS3 – Gaming system, though, i’m wondering if I even need it anymore
Apple MacMini – An older 1.83 GHz Core2Duo machine, w/1gb Ram & 80Gb HD
Various Cables, power bar, etc etc.

I’m going to be picking up a Logitech DiNovo Mini as a keyboard/mouse controller, but for the time being, i’m just using my iPhone connected to the network, using Air Mouse. Thus far, its been fine.

I’m also considering picking up a Sony HT-CT100 3.1 Soundbar Surround system – perhaps when my next paycheck comes in!

I’ll post some photos of the setup in a day or so.

Back a few months ago when I bought an Apple TV to be able to play with this little app that needed to be hacked onto the Apple TV, I didn’t even know that I would enjoy it so much. Since then, its cut my TV watching in half, and well, we don’t even subscribe to Cable services anymore. If this is a glimpse at what is coming in the future for the television industry, I like it.

If I were to give any advice to the big TV networks – i’d say that they should jump on the bandwagon and find a way to work with these people, because THIS is where television is going. I’d hate to make this parallel, but I’ve got a feeling that this whole TV On demand thing could potentially be the next Napster/Mp3 revolution. Lets learn from past mistakes, and take the right steps.

Thanks again to the Boxee team!!

Can I just say, that it has basically completely changed the way that I watch tv – and the best part is that it has so much incredible potential to be so much more – This little box paired with the Boxee software creates this incredible social media, music media playing, podcast playing, streaming internet video playing, downloading, wonderfully…… and so on.

I think the best part about it is that it automatically indexes and finds media that is stored on your networked drives. So in my case, i’ve got a pretty basic network consisting of a modem, a wireless N router, and a NAS drive. I keep all of my media on the NAS drive (that could be RAIDed for security), and boxee knows to keep an eye on the files that are on the NAS drive – so whenever I upload a new file to the NAS (usually through finder), Boxee often automatically finds it, and makes it best guess as to what the movie, or tv show is called (sometimes its wrong, but its super easy to change the name, and give it the right data – it IS getting much better at identifying content though).

I highly suggest that if you haven’t already tried the alpha, that you give it a whirl. It runs on Windows, OSX, Linux and Apple TV and is relatively easy to install, and if you get into a bind, they’ve got a really great development team, and also a very active forum – someone is always available to help.

Check it out at boxee.tv