The Hickensian

9.02.09 Boxee and Plex

8 comments
Tagged with: apps, boxee, mediacenter, plex

My journey to find the ideal Media Centre has brought me via Plex and Boxee. Both are media center applications based on the popular open source XBox Media Center (XBMC), with Boxee focussing on the social network slant, and Plex solely on OS X integration.

Plex has a very slick interface, and everytime I mention Boxee, there is the inevitable “Why not Plex?’ cry from other Mac users. At the moment, the answer is that Plex doesn’t yet offer me much over just using Front Row. The slick interface has more character than Front Row though, particularly in it’s use of online databases to provide metadata and large format photographs:

It doesn’t always get the show/movie right however. The Secret Show recordings were believed to be ‘Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show’, and this couldn’t be manually removed.

The main appeal of Plex is that it’s built for OS X only, so you’re getting the best integration – no pandering to cross platform needs. In particular iTunes library scanning works really well, and plays iTunes store DRM’s material, an area where Boxee failed (see below).

What I miss from Plex are services like BBC iPlayer and EyeTV integration, which I believe are planned. That’s where Boxee comes in.

Boxee, on the face of it, doesn’t have quite as much UI sexiness as Plex, but I think it’s more thoughtfully laid out. For example, when you log in, the home screen shows you not only what you and your friends have been watching/listening to, but what you’ve recently added. Here is your new content – go straight to it.

The social network side is intriguing, but the integration of internet services (too numerous to mention) is it’s forté. In particular, the one that interests me the most, is that the latest release supports BBC iPlayer, and does it rather well, using the Beeb’s Big Screen Interface :

There are only two downsides I’ve experienced so far: Firstly, it doesn’t show all of my Music (around 800 non-DRM albums are just missing), despite leaving it overnight to process the collection. After digging around on forums, this seemed to be caused by scraping Last.fm for information, and that a different source was intended for future releases. That doesn’t explain why random songs are missing from albums though. Until then, I have to browse the folder structure to find what I want to play.

The biggie is stability. In the middle of watching a movie with the family it crashed. I installed the EyeTV plugin from XBMC and it crashed. I asked it to look for a SMB share and it crashed. When it crashes on the Mac Mini the only solution is turn it off and restart it. It feels churlish mentioning this when Boxee is in Alpha, and if you follow Team Boxee on their blog and twitter, you’ll know it’s progressing at a good pace. It just means it’s not that usable for me at the moment.

While playing with Boxee, I found a few useful tricks and add-ons, such as:

You can also get a Front Row appliance to put a Boxee entry into the Front Row Menu, making it easy to launch with the Apple Remote
If you have problems (like I did) getting TV Shows to show up in the TV Show menu, editing the filename does the trick, but obviously that’s a bit tedious.
To stream from your Mac, you can set up an SMB share, which will then show up as a media source in Boxee:
The snappily title XBMCEyeTVParser will allow you to watch EyeTV recordings in Boxee. Oddly, it places it in Videos > Internet, rather than TV Shows. As mentioned above, it did cause crashes for me, but your mileage may vary.

Ultimately, Boxee is geared up for the US market – Hulu, ABC, Netflix and such, some of which can be accessed in the UK via VPN trickery. You would then have to disable that in order to watch BBC iPlayer, which I’m more likely to watch. Not a big deal on your laptop, but when you’re trying to control a Mac Mini with a little remote, it’s going to require clever scripts and patience.

Despite stability and iTunes library niggles, I prefer Boxee over Plex. In fact, Boxee instills feelings of love and devotion in me for it’s online services, recommendations and layout. However, I’ve come to realise that the problem for me isn’t ‘Boxee or Plex’, it’s that controlling a Mac Mini remotely can be a pain in the arse. I haven’t tried Boxee on AppleTV though, which may well be the answer, but the hacky nature of it put me off.

Neither Boxee or Plex have ended up being my ideal solution, which is in fact a Playstation 3 with PlayTV. That’s for another post!

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ Derek said 364 days ago:

Jon you have to post your solution faster! I’m planning to buy an AppleTV soon and put Boxee on it, but I’m following your posts and keep waiting for you to post the One Ultimate Solution!

You still have until about May though, as I’m deployed to Iraq and won’t buy it until I get back, but I still need to do all of the appropriate research and wife-convincing before then! :)

No.2

∞ zakharm said 364 days ago:

It is very welcome to find someone looking for the ultimate solution and I’m glad you’ve now added Plex and Boxee to the systems you have tested.

I believe I have found my solution in Plex, but requires some work and extras to make this happen. I have personally been using Plex because I enjoy the stability that it provides over Boxee. Boxee definitely has been catching all the headlines, but their features first, bugs later approach is not for me.

The OS X integration seems like the way to go for me even with the Hackintosh that I’ve built. They have added new features like native use of the Harmony remotes that make it extremely usable. This gives you a full remote to control Plex vs using the limited number of buttons on the Apple remote.

I also have Remote Buddy installed and after a little work it allows me to program custom functions into the remote like activating Plex, hide Plex, active iTunes, sleep the system, etc. My goal is to not have to screen share into the system.

I don’t use my TV to browse my music collection, but instead keep my music in iTunes and use Apple’s iPhone app “Remote” to control my music. This might change when Boxee or Plex release their own iPhone control app, but I couldn’t be happier with using “Remote” and iTunes. Since Plex has the iTunes integration, I can browse my music if I want to in Plex, but usually don’t.

Being on a computer vs a dedicated set top box (STB)(AppleTV, Western Digital, Popcorn Hour) it allows you many more options that bring me closer to the ultimate solution. Things like CD / DVD ripping, downloading from Bittorrent / Usenet or archiving shows off my Tivo 3. I’m sure you can do Bittorrent on a STB, but I can’t imagine it would be as easy. One thing to note about Boxee and AppleTV, it does not have the processing power to play Netflix.

I believe it is only a matter of time before Plex gets Netflix, Hulu, etc. (There are some new features coming soon to Plex, but the team hasn’t revealed them yet.) Since they are all forked from the XBMC project any progress on any of the three projects Boxee, Plex, XBMC should eventually be reflected in the others.

I look forward to more reviews on your hunt for the ideal media center.

No.3

∞ Jamie said 363 days ago:

I use plex regularly and have discovered an iPlayer plugin that is pretty quick and stable. It’s easy to find via google and drop into the plugins folder. You then access it through My Videos > Video Plugins.

Also, it is possible to manually change an item that has been incorrectly tagged. Make sure it is highlighted and hit C for a context menu that lets you choose from a number of tasks.

I really like the way plex works, and so far it is the only software I have found that will play a 7Gb video file withoug glitches on my new MBPro.

No.4

∞ Chris said 363 days ago:

In addition to Jamie’s tip about manually changing an incorrectly tagged item, you can also use XBMCEyeTVParser with Plex.

It goes into Plugins folder and then accessed through Video – Plugins (like the iPlayer one Jamie mentioned).

I have to be honest, Plex + Remote Buddy caters for all my HTPC needs. I’m not in the US or UK so iPlayer and Hulu etc are non-starters for me, and I’ve no interest in the social networking side of Boxee (or the bugs!) Horses for courses thought!

No.5

∞ Jason said 361 days ago:

For those of you wondering about Boxee on Apple TV, wonder no more. It really is one of the most painless installs out there. I’m no hack genius and this thing was easy to put on and it’s changed the way I view / collect media. I have a 500 GB hard drive hooked up to my Apple Airport Extreme. These 2 things rest in the corner. I then have a 37 inch LG LCD TV with an Apple TV hooked into it. I’ve set my hard drive up as a network source through Boxee and basically just call up what I want, when I want. Dead simple to get that set up too.

The install is easy. I would strongly recommend this site… http://gizmodo.com/5082130/how-to-max-out-apple-tvs-potential-with-boxee . It gives you a step-by-step in installing it. All you need is a Mac and a flash drive.

Enjoy.

No.6

∞ Craig Michael Patrick said 361 days ago:

I have a Mac-centric household, but I chose the PS3 for a media center for a number of reasons:

* I can stream media from my mac via MediaLink;

* The PS3 offers a fairly consistent stream of firmware updates, allowing users to view a pretty solid number of codecs;

* Unconvinced of the solidity of Apple’s position as a media distributor for Hollywood – Sony, however, makes major motion pictures;

* Built in browser allows users to view Hulu.com content via the Flash plugin (but in fairness, I have found it to be choppy on my wireless connection);

* Blu-ray for spectacle films (i.e. 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Dark Knight, etc.) though I’m not convinced that Blu-ray optical media will make it longterm. Hard drives seem better to me;

* Video games;

* Hook up external USB drives and it recognizes your media, though not as quite as easily as it should;

* USB Keyboards and printers, too;

However, there are a few shortcomings:

* Usability on the PS3 is something to be desired (e.g. using a bluetooth is bloody frustrating as you have to first pair it, then tell it to work with the PS3 and these two steps are in completely separate settings sections);

* Some media codecs SHOULD work, but it’s a bit fickle with variants of Xvid, etc.

That’s all that comes to mind. I can however offer my absolute envy for you UK folks who have PlayTV, which we don’t have here in the States. I’d love to read your thoughts on that device, Jon.

Best regards.

No.7

∞ Jon Roobottom said 359 days ago:

The guy in the Boxee video tutorial has the definitive geek voice. He’s my new hero.

No.8

∞ Cornelius Carter said 355 days ago:

Boxee is a great media center and works on the apple tv however most of the internet video is choppy especially with hulu. I recommend spending some extra bucks for a mac mini.