Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Boxee for Windows Goes Live - and Adds MLB, Digg, Tumblr & Current

Boxee Logo

Boxee had it's "Boxee Event" in San Francisco Tuesday night.  They declared the winner of it's App Dev Challenge, announced the official Windows version of Boxee, MLB, Digg and more.  Read on for the details.

 

Boxee App Dev Challenge Winners

Winners for the Boxee App Dev Challenge include:
Video Winners:
    Popular Choice- BBC Live (Ian Tweedie)
    Judge's Choice - Open Course Ware (Roshan Revankar)
Music Winners:
    Popular Choice - Drop Boxee (John Steinberg)
    Judge's Choice - We Are Hunted (Nick Dima)
Photo Winners:
    Popular Choice - Facebook (Junda Liu)
    Judge's Choice - Facebook (Junda Liu)
Each of the judge's choice winners will receive a Sony Bravia 46" TV and the Popular Choice winners will receive a 4TB Drobo courtesy of Data Robotics and Seagate - very cool.

 

Boxee for Windows Beta Now Public

Boxee released their windows version to public beta which means anyone can download and try it out.  If you haven't already give it a test drive.

 

MLB.TV Premium on Boxee

Boxee added MLB.TV Premium, MLB.TV is MLB.com's online streaming service with high quality video streams of live games with premium features like DVR functionality and HD Video when available.

Boxee MLB.TV

 

Other New Apps for Boxee

Also announced was the addition of Digg video content where Boxee users can view those videos and eventually digg the items right from Boxee.

Tumblr support was also added to Boxee.  This allows you to stream music shared by people on tumblr.  Photo slideshow via Tumblr was also added.

Finally, CurrentTV was added for news and entertainment streaming.

 

New Version Changes:

Changes/updates to the Boxee program include:

  • A new navigation layout.  The changes here are pretty minor, but some streamlining has taken place such as a more clear separation of internet and local media for instance.
  • 1080P for Ubuntu users running NVidia
  • Improved playback of Internet streams.
  • Introduced VDPAU hardware acceleration on nVIDIA GPUs under Linux (major kudos to Team XBMC for this one).
  • Fixed M4A and M4V playback support.
  • Fixed low volume during video playback under Mac OSX and AppleTV.
  • Performance improvement and lower CPU usage under Mac OSX.
  • Enhanced codec support, improving overall playback of all media.
  • Improved DVD playback.
  • Official Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jacklope support.
  • PulseAudio support under Linux (shaky, but works).
  • MP3 files indexed based on id3 tags.

Read more at the Boxee Blog