Alternatives to the now dead Boxee?

[Sneckster]

I just bought my son a pc for his bedroom and want him to be able to watch all the films and tv on my NAS without him having to go through all the folders and maybe mess everything up. So I thought, I'll stick boxee on there for him as he is used to the Boxee Box...

...then I remembered that they killed it.

So, which other software should I be looking at to just bring up the dvd covers and let him choose what to watch?

I've had a look at plex, xbmc and mythtv but wouldn't know which is best or if there are any others to try.

Any advice?

[haveringcottage]

you can still get hold of the 0.9 (IMO the best version of the software) from various sources. Darci has a link to it somewhere in her 10 top tips sticky....

[darcilicious]

http://www.bartsidee.nl/downloads/ for downloads

As for alternatives, if you're going to need more than one front end (e.g. more than one computer), I'd go with Plex which now has a client/server model with a centralized media database for tracking the metadata of your content.

If it's just going to be a one-time, standalone kind of deal, then XBMC would suffice.

I don't know anything about MythTV other than its primary focus is for PVR capabilities with integration into XBMC possible.

[Sneckster]

I might concentrate on checking out XMBC then, although it has crashed the two times I've tried it on the laptop.


I love the 1.5 boxee version though so might just try and get it working on Ubuntu 12.04 and hope it keeps working for a while longer... or at least until I can get a version of ubuntuTV

[Sneckster]

I tried to get Boxee working with Ubuntu but even with the dependencies installed it still wouldn't load up, so I went with XBMC instead which I think when the box is dead or dropped I might move over to altogether for my tv and film viewing.

[minimovers]

I tried to get Boxee working with Ubuntu but even with the dependencies installed it still wouldn't load up, so I went with XBMC instead which I think when the box is dead or dropped I might move over to altogether for my tv and film viewing.

I think XBMC will be your best best now. I heard that the Canonical team is coming out with a TV version of Ubuntu but that 's pretty far away...

[Leon10]

I am totally agreed with darcilicious. You can download bartsidee from that link. I think after downloading it you will get a better alternative than all.

[vexati0n]

They should have kept Boxee alive for DIY HTPC users. But they didn't, and now it's going to be fun to watch them get creamed by Google TV before anybody's ever even heard of Boxee.

[jameskirsop]

Would people be interested in a pre-compiled .deb file? I've rolled my own, after a little hacking, which seems to be running OK. I haven't had a crash yet, but performance hasn't been great, but that could be my outdated hardware (lower-end Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 6000 PCI-E GFX card, 2GB RAM). It's currently running on Ubuntu 12.04.

Edit: So here's a list of things that don't appear to work/bugs:
- AirPlay Streaming
- Screen Saver hangs after a while
- Currently having a bunch of problems streaming audio from my SMB share on my local server that weren't present in the previous 0.9 beta binary release

[Brainer]

I may be interested, but I'm a bit of a Linux newbie. What is the difference between your pre-compiled .deb and the .debs that are available everywhere else? That is an honest question, no offense meant.

Brainer

Would people be interested in a pre-compiled .deb file? I've rolled my own, after a little hacking, which seems to be running OK. I haven't had a crash yet, but performance hasn't been great, but that could be my outdated hardware (lower-end Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 6000 PCI-E GFX card, 2GB RAM). It's currently running on Ubuntu 12.04.

Edit: So here's a list of things that don't appear to work/bugs:
- AirPlay Streaming
- Screen Saver hangs after a while
- Currently having a bunch of problems streaming audio from my SMB share on my local server that weren't present in the previous 0.9 beta binary release