Brandon Sharitt's Blog

Even though Boxee is technically list as “alpha” quality software, I decided to go ahead and give it a spin since these days alpha seems to be the new beta, and I’m okay running beta software. So I installed the software on a shiny new Ubuntu install on my wife’s old laptop and tried it out. On the bright side, nearly everything worked well out of the box, but the first thing that struck me was how slow and sluggish the whole interface was. Now the computer it’s installed on was no speed demon, but it’s been able to run MythTV and Windows Media Center(actually came preinstalled with this) with no problems. Right away I was disappointed that Hulu wasn’t working today, especially since that was the biggest draw to Boxee for me. Not getting discouraged, I decided to head over the CBS “channel” where full episodes of the classic Star Trek are available. Unfortunately, Boxee doesn’t seem to do any meaningful buffering and the video stuttered and skipped through the few minutes and waited and kept watching. Again, I wasn’t going to discouraged that easily and went to the WB channel to watch so B5 clips, but again with the skipping and stuttering. At this point I decided that the Boxee team just had some more work to do on their internet video, since these internet video sites usually work quite well on this same internet connection.

Next I decided that internet video was just icing on the cake, and what I really wanted was to be able to play the music and videos on my file server on my TV and its associated sound system, so I decided to watch some Darkwing Duck I had. Surely Boxee could do that. With great backends like Gstreamer, Xine, and MPlayer, anyone could hack together an interface for a TV, the hard part’s been done. When it comes to videos, I was sorely disappointed. The videos skipped forward without warning and the sound wouldn’t stay in sync. Just to make sure, I played the same videos on regular media players on the same PC and they played great. By this point I decided to give up for now, but I might try Boxee again in a few months to see how things are coming along.

With Boxee a bust, I needed something else. Sure, there’s the ubiquitous MythTV, but since I don’t need another PVR, it seems like a bit much. Fortunately I stumbled across Fludendo’s Elisa Media Center conviently in the Ubuntu repositories. It’s not as feature packed as Boxee, but it does at handle what it claims to do, and quite well I might add. Basically, Elisa is a Linux clone of Apple’s Frontrow software. Like Frontrow, Elisa is rather bare and basic, but it does put your music, videos, and pictures on your TV without a lot of fuss or overhead. One bright spot is that Elisa does have a plugins API that might extend it nicely, and there are already a couple useful ones like YouTube. This will probably be something I’ll be looking at working with if I ever get the time. The only problem with Elisa that it required a bit of manual tweaking to get the remote to work, but it was pretty easily found in the documentation. Overall I’m happy with Elisa, but I would have liked the online videos of Boxee.