Tonight at 7pm, Boxee will present / release their new BETA of their platform in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at a sold out event. For those of you who can’t make it (like me), here’s a stream of the event to watch live.
On Boxee Beta Eve (aka last night) I was messing around with my SiliconDust HDHomeRun dual HD network tuner (needs a better name). I was struggling with GB-PVR, and decided to test it out on Windows 7’s Windows Media Center. I hadn’t used it for live TV yet, or for any video for that matter.
Windows Media Center a very intuitive, easy to use interface for navigating video content on my network. What I found to my surprise, though, was that it also had Internet TV featured in the program guide. While they weren’t full episodes of the shows they featured, they were high quality clips of popular TV shows. Additionally, it had native support for Netflix Watch Instantly, which I immediately fired up.
Whats my point? Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve enjoyed playing around with the Boxee alpha up to this point, but it has had some pretty big drawbacks. Its support for Netflix has been shaky, although I’m quite sure that will be cleared up tonight. But more importantly, it has lacked the ability (at least on Windows) to play a DVD movie that you’ve backed up on your hard drive in VIDEO_TS folder structure. It can play an ISO, but I had built my library with folders, not ISOs. Windows Media Center had no problem playing my movies. In a nutshell, WMC was very Boxee-like in terms of navigation, but actually performed the basic functions that I consider to be prerequisites better than Boxee. Maybe tonight that will all change.
While Boxee will continue to garner most of the attention, and probably surpass WMC in functionality very quickly (it already has in terms of available content from the Web), for most users, Windows Media Center is an easy-to-use, pre-installed option that will meet most – if not all – of your HTPC needs.