GregMS Universe

I’ve finished work on the Frostbite Film Festival Boxee Application. It currently contains all of the videos for the 2010 competition.

If your not familiar with the festival, it is a 24-hour film-making contest in which the participating teams had to develop a three minute short film that included 5 mystery plot elements revealed the morning of the contest. For 2010, these Elements Included:

* A Power Tool(s)
* A Sandwich
* A Prank Phone Call
* Something Breaking
* A Freeze Frame Shot

After the required elements were revealed, the participants have 24 hours to: write, cast, shoot, edit, musically score, and submit their original films. Entries are judged based on originality, adherence to the rules, technical quality, and overall entertainment value. More information about the competition can be found on their website: http://www.frostbitefilmfest.com/.

To add the application into Boxee, just add the following repository: http://dir.gregms.com and then add the Frostbite Film Fest app. If you have already added the all inclusive third-party Boxee Repository, then the Frostbite Film Fest app is available from there.

Boxee app, Boxee, Frostbite Film Fest

I’ve finished designing my second application for the Boxee platform. I chose to create it around one of my favorite online web-series The Legend of Neil.

If you enjoyed The Legend of Zelda series as much as I did, then I think you’d enjoy the NSFW web-series, The Legend of Neil. It is about a gas station attendant who gets sucked into ‘The Legend of Zelda’ and has to fight his way out. You’ll get the idea of the show by watching the intro…

Below are a few screen-shots of what the app looks like in Boxee:

To add it to Boxee, just add the following repository: http://dir.gregms.com and then add The Legend of Neil app. If you have already added the all inclusive third-party Boxee Repository, then The Legend of Neil should now be available.

Boxee app, Boxee, legend of neil

On December 7th in New York, Avner Ronen shown off his companies latest version of their Boxee software. This latest version will bring Boxee out of the Alpha phase, and into the Beta.

 
The Boxee Beta supports an entirely new UI layout and design.

• The top section contains both local and Internet based media, now all in one click. It also houses the Boxee apps.
• The feed section to the left combines not only content from your friends on Boxee, but if you put in your Twitter or Facebook login, it will pull in video your (non-Boxee) friends post.
• The middle is featured content (or apps) recommended from Boxee. At this current time, Boxee is not getting paid for anything here, but they are leaving open the possibility of it.
• To the right is the queue area. If you find video in Boxee you wish to watch (but you don’t have time to watch it), you can queue it and it will go there. Avner said that there will also be widgets made available to queue video you find on the web that you wish to watch in Boxee later, but he did not demonstrate any at the event. Also, if you have a TV show set to a watch list, new episodes will show up in your queue.

One of my favorite new features is the bookmarking feature. While Avner didn’t demonstrate how video gets bookmarked, local video files can now be bookmarked so you can stop watching it, and continue watching at a later time picking back up where you left off. This feature is essential for me to begin moving away from MythTV for local video content.

Overall I will be very excited to test this latest version and I plan to do a walkthrough of it just like I have done with previous versions. Invites to test the software will begin going out anytime (if they haven’t already). For anyone not on the list, the software will be made available to the public as an open-Beta beginning in January.
Read more…

Boxee Boxee, Boxee Beta

I’ve been interested for a long time in developing my own apps for the Boxee platform and over this past month, I finally had a chance to do it.

The first app I created is for the round-table technology show Cranky Geeks hosted by none other than John C. Dvorak.

For those that watched Dvorak’s show Silicon Spin on TechTV/ZDTV, Cranky Geeks is a similar type of show. But if you didn’t watch, Cranky Geeks is a 30-minute weekly discussion show over technology topics of the week. Sebastian Rupley usually joins him as the “co-crank” along with two other panel members. Some notable panelist have included: Molly Wood, Om Malik, Tom Merritt, Jim Louderback, Harry McCracken, David Spark, Garnett Lee, Leo Laporte, Veronica Belmont, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.

Below is a screen-shot of what the app looks like in Boxee:

To add it to Boxee, just add the following repository: http://dir.gregms.com and then add the Cranky Geeks app. If you have already added the all inclusive third-party Boxee Repository, then the Cranky Geeks app should now be available.

My next app will be The Legend of Neil webseries, which is a spoof on the television/video game series Legend of Zelda. It is a NSFW webseries, but very entertaining.

Update: The Legend of Neil app is now available: Click here to find out more.

Boxee app, Boxee, cranky geeks, dvorak, legend of neil

In the past several months, I’ve seen a ton of a new video and audio apps added to Boxee and so I decided to do a new walkthrough of the interface and how I use it.

For those who don’t know, Boxee is a free cross-platform media center application based upon XBMC. Boxee can scan your network for shared (or hosted) video, music and photo files. It then searches the web for album art for each file and organizes them within Boxee by media type (TV Show, Movie, Music, Photos).

The best part of Boxee is its ability to play Internet content all from within its own application. Instead of going to Hulu.com to watch the episodes of Family Guy or Fringe, you can watch it from within Boxee and if you like the episode, you can recommend it to your other Boxee friends. Internet content current available in the Windows, Linux and Mac/ATV version of Boxee include Hulu, CBS, Joost, PBS, Pandora, Last.FM, Flickr and much more.
Read more…

Boxee Boxee, Facebook, flickr, HTPC, hulu, Pandora, Rev3, The Guild, twit

Below is an interview of Avner Ronen (the person behind Boxee) done by Intruders.tv

“In this interview, Avner discusses the future of TV, the importance of interface design to building a successful product and why Sacha Baron Cohen might be a likely candidate to transform the media’s approach to online.”

Boxee Boxee

Boxee has finally released an update for Linux that puts it on par with the Apple TV and Mac version’s of Boxee. The update is version number 0.9.11.5777 with download instructions found at http://app.boxee.tv/download.

It is available for Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and the newly released 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) 32-bit only (no 64-bit yet).
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Boxee app box, Boxee, boxeehq, hulu, linux, Pandora, pbs, RadioTime, twit, video

I now have Boxee Alpha (build 0.9.9.5324) for Windows installed. Below are a few screenshots that highlight some of the new additions.

App Box

There is a new option on the left-side that says ‘App Box’. This replaces the old way to add repositories (applications people outside of Boxee have created) or remove content to make it less cluttered.
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Boxee app box, Boxee, boxeehq, pbs, twit, video, windows

I learned today that Hulu’s content providers have asked them to block the media center application Boxee from accessing their content.

Honestly, what are the content providers of Hulu thinking? For those unfamiliar, Hulu.com is a joint-venture between NBC and News Corp. but has more content then just those. It’s unclear at this time which content provider has asked them to block Boxee, but blocking them is just plain stupid. While Boxee is in a way open-source, their Hulu application is closed, plus those who watch Hulu on Boxee still watch all the commercials one sees on their website.

So to sum up, Boxee provides a way to get more people to legally watch TV shows, and people still watch their ads. Why would Hulu content providers not want to be Boxee? The more places the better!

Well here is another question, why is it that CBS (another Boxee application) does not have the 1st episode of Jericho (from the 1st season). I would love to start watching the series, but when I can’t watch the 1st episode, how can I get hooked? They have the 2nd episode, and then they skip to the 6th. Does this make sense to anyone? Check it out for yourself: http://www.cbs.com/video/?showname=primetime/jericho#video

Wake up content providers!

On a side-note, for those missing Hulu on Boxee, Jake Marsh has created an app to help ease the pain. Just add “rss://thejakemarsh.com/boxee/” to your sources from within the Boxee app itself (not via the website). Or visit http://tvrss.net/shows/ for free downloads of all your favorite shows without commercials. Thanks once again Hulu content providers!

Boxee Press Release: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/02/18/the-hulu-situation/
Hulu Press Release: http://blog.hulu.com/2009/2/18/doing-hard-things

Boxee Boxee, hulu, stupid

My Boxee Interface

Edit: As of 2/20/09, Hulu will no longer be not be available on Boxee. Hopefully this is temporary. Also the next Boxee update is scheduled to be released March 24th. The March 5th release date was postponed partly due to the Hulu situation.

Edit (4/27/09): New versions of Boxee for Linux, Windows, Mac and Apple TV have been released with a new Hulu Feeds app. This replaces the previous Hulu application and allows those like to me once again to watch Hulu content on our living room TV.

I talk a lot about my Boxee setup, so I thought I would do a write-up about each of the features I find most valuable from the Boxee application and explain in detail what each one is.

For those unfamiliar, Boxee is a free cross-platform media center application based upon XBMC. Boxee can scan your network for shared (or hosted) video, music and photo files. It then searches the web for album art for each file and organizes them within Boxee by media type (TV Show, Movie, Music, Photos).

The best part of Boxee is its ability to play Internet content all from within its own application. Instead of going to Hulu.com to watch the latest Battlestar Galactica, you can watch it from within Boxee and if you like the episode, you can recommend it to your other Boxee friends. Internet content current available in the Linux version of Boxee include Hulu, CBS, Joost, Adult Swim, Last.FM, Flickr and much more. Boxee is still in alpha testing but is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Apple TV.
Read more…

Boxee adult swim, apple tv, Boxee, cbs, flickr, HTPC, hulu, joost, last.fm, linux, mac, MythTV, twit, windows, xbmc