high on solder

I have been using Boxee for a couple of months now and overall it has been a very enjoyable experience. Boxee is easily the best media center implementation available for Linux. For a long time MythTV was the standard for Linux media centers and I have previously written about how well it can work. The main drawback of MythTV for me, however, is that it was primarily built to work as a DVR and what I need most is a way to easily navigate my library of video and music, not record new content. As a home theater PC interface MythTV was adequate but Boxee is simply better in every way. Where MythTV was stark and boring, Boxee is much more visually interesting and brings a lot more flare to the HTPC experience. It is Boxee's additional capabilities that really make it stand apart from MythTV, specifically its ability to stream virtually any content served from an RSS feed and its integration with services such as Hulu are the deal breakers that made me switch from MythTV.

While Boxee is still technically in alpha right now it is a fairly stable piece of software. Even so I had to make some tweaks to Ubuntu 8.10 to get it working properly on my Dell Studio Hybrid.

• Set System-Preferences-Appearance-Visual Effects to None. For some reason Boxee would not leave fullscreen mode properly while Visual Effects were enabled
• Disable and Remove PulseAudio. I found this thread in the Boxee Forum regarding the problem I was having where the audio played at regular speed while the video played at 2x. I also experienced audio freezes which would cause Boxee to crash. These issues were resolved by following these steps:

1. Goto System-Preferences-Sound and set all three of the Sound Playback settings to ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
2. Run the following terminal commands:

                         sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
                         killall pulseaudio
                         sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
                         sudo apt-get install esound

• Install the LIRC & Mythbuntu Control Centre packages in the repository. These allow you to setup your Windows Media Center remote control which is fully compatible with Boxee. Launch the Mythbuntu Control Centre, goto Infrared Devices-Remote and select your remote control, which in my case is the Windows Media Center Remote (new version Philips et. al.) since I am using an Anyware GP-IR02BK, and click Apply. It will then generate a LIRC config file and Boxee should now respond to your remote control.
• Lengthen the remote button repeat delay. I found this necessary because I would occasionally get unitentional double-clicks while navigating the interface. Luckily someone posted a solution in this thread in the Boxee Forum:

1. Create a file called advancedsettings.xml and place it in your ~/.boxee/UserData folder
2. Add the following text to the file:

                        <advancedsettings>
                             <remoterepeat>1000</remoterepeat>
                        </advancedsettings>

After performing these steps I had a much better performing and stable Ubuntu 8.10 Boxee setup. For more info on Boxee watch the following two episodes of DL.TV in which one of Boxee's creators runs through some of it features as well as how to install it on an Apple TV.

• DL.TV Episode 244
• DL.TV Episode 258