31 Facts About Boxee

Boxee was a cross-platform freeware HTPC software application with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV.

Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee used as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.

Boxee gained the ability to watch live TV on the Boxee Box using a live TV stick in January 2012.

Boxee supported a wide range of popularly used multimedia formats, and it included features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an array of third-party plugins.

When run on modern PC hardware, Boxee was able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p.

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Boxee was able to use DXVA on Windows Vista and newer Microsoft operating-systems to utilize GPU accelerated video decoding to assist with process of video decoding of high-definition videos.

Boxee supported NBC Universal's Hulu quite early on, but in February 2009 was asked by Hulu to remove the service at the request of Hulu's content partners.

Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulu's RSS feeds, but Hulu blocked access.

In 2009, Boxee introduced a new plugin architecture based on the XUL framework which technically allows any web-based application to be ported into an application for Boxee integration.

Boxee was able to play Adobe Flash content from sites such as YouTube and Hulu, and display HTML5 or Silverlight content from such web-based services such as HBO Go and Netflix.

Boxee shipped with a closed source, binary-only, program called "bxflplayer", which was used to load Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight proprietary plugins.

Social networking component of Boxee was the differentiator from other media center software.

Boxee required registered user accounts, which formed a social network of fellow Boxee users.

User's friends' Boxee activity feeds were displayed on the user's home screen, as was the user's own recent activity.

Boxee had extensibility and integration with online sources for free and premium streaming content.

Boxee encouraged users to make and submit their own add-on apps and plug-ins to add additional content accessible from within Boxee.

Boxee was designed to take advantage of the system's network port if a broadband Internet connection was available, enabling the user to get information from such sites as IMDb, TV.

Boxee included the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.

Boxee could be used to play most common multimedia containers and formats from a local source, .

Video Library, one of the Boxee metadata databases, was a key feature of Boxee.

Library Mode view in Boxee allowed a user to browse video content by categories such as Genre, Title, Year, Actors and Director.

Boxee had the capability to on the fly parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video files on a hard-drive or network-share, and ISO and IMG DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives.

Boxee featured on-the-fly audio frequency resampling, gapless playback, crossfading, ReplayGain, cue sheet and Ogg Chapter support.

Early builds of Boxee included a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there were Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default.

Boxee Box by D-Link was a Linux-based set-top device and media extender that first began shipping in 33 countries worldwide on 10 November 2010.

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Iomega TV with Boxee was a Linux device which came pre-installed with Boxee media center software.

Iomega TV with Boxee shipped with a similar small two-sided RF remote control with 4-way D-pad navigation and full a QWERTY keypad as standard.

Boxee featured a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar.

Boxee introduced an additional plugin architecture based on the XUL framework which enables any web-based application to be integrated into Boxee as an app add-on.

Boxee admitted the software was included in each device, but stated that their financial agreements with other companies were at risk if they complied.

On 31 October 2012 Boxee posted a statement on their website saying they had to make a decision between releasing a device which was hackable, or one which was commercially viable with premium content.