A little while ago was my birthday and i decided it would be a good time to treat myself to some fancy new gedgetry in the form of an Apple TV. Now most poeple will tell you that an Apple TV is a DRM packed fancy toy that you dont really need, which i guess is true, but with a bit of effort you can create the best media center computer out there. If you want to you could use a laptop or something instead but that just doesn’t look as nice

The software that makes all this possible is called boxee, its based on XBMC and is currently in alpha, but dont let that put you off. Here’s some of the things it can do:

Stream Video from iPlayer, Hulu, CBS, Apple Trailers, etc

Play your local videos - Divx, Xvid and tonnes of other formats

Organise your videos - It can download reviews, covers, puts TV shows into name and series, gets all the info on your movies, its like having all the covers in digital form!

Play all your music - I haven’t got that into this yet as the Apple TV does a top job with this, but i will start to look at what Boxee can offer.

Stream Music - Last FM is supported along with other popular sites.

Be Social - Got a friend on Boxee? Why not reccomend a movie to them? Or a tv show?

Download Torrents - Boxee comes with a built in torrent downloader along with an easy to access list of public torrents, that means from your little apple remote you can access movies from 1920 for free! Alternatively you could always copy a .torrent file to Boxee over your network and download any content you want, which i’d guess will be the choice of 99.999% of Boxee users.

I really am happy using Boxee and cant say enough good stuff about it, i’ve even downgraded my satellite package as I just dont need all those channels anymore!

There are a few downsides to using it with the Apple TV

It has a tiny hard drive - The basic one is 40 gig, I forked out the extra for the 160 gig option but that will be full in a few weeks! Luckily Boxee does support networked drives, so not the end of the world I just need to get some sort of NAS.

The processor is slow - The processor on the Apple TV just 1 GHz so not exactly fast, and as of yet Boxee has yet to make use of the graphics card so all the rendering is being done on the processor. I’ve found that once i get up to about 720p or so your going to see it judder. The good thing is that the people at Boxee know about this and plan to improve it in the future.

Internet TV is jumpy - The streaming internet TV (BBC iPlayer) seems to be jumpy, i’m not talking about the download here, just that the encoding quality isn’t great and its tough to watch on a big plasma. Maybe this is the processor speed, but my guess is that internet TV just wasnt designed to go onto a huge TV?

Im in the UK - That means i can only watch some iPlayer, Joost, etc. I dont get access to the american channels that seem to have amazing content. So my next job is to work on setting up some sort of VPN tunnel to the US that i can turn on and off!

In these times of financial doom and gloom its quite nice to see that by choosing your technology well you can get an amazing system thats going to pay for itself in a few months, meaning I can get the same great TV without spending loads each month.

If you have a spare computer lying around you can do it for even cheaper, although Boxee is currently only for Ubuntu and OS X, but if you do have an old PC just install ubuntu and your ready to go!

I cant say enough about this cool bit of software so its best you check it out for yourself, pop over to Boxee to sign up and get a copy of the software, and if you want to hack your Apple TV to run it the instructions are here.

Oh and if you do sign up dont forget to add cwhitcombe as a friend!