If you follow me on Twitter, Facebook or know me in real life, you’ve probably heard me ranting about my new Apple TV box. I bought it just before Christmas and have been using it along with my wonderful Christmas gift from my parents – a 32″ Toshiba (1080i) LCD HDTV.
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