Turn an old PC into a media centre with boxee

by jeremy

Years ago I purchased my first Xbox and with my love of the saying "If it’s working fine then hack it”... I of course instantly ripped it apart and mod’d it to run homebrew, a non Microsoft certified operating system. Over the following few years I found a wealth of fantastic applications that would run on my trusty mod’d Xbox, however nothing ever came close to the one killer app... XBMC or Xbox Media Center.

XBMC turns your Xbox into a fully fledged media centre with the ability to play almost any format of audio or video. I followed the progress of the open source XBMC project as it progressed from a buggy and simple media player into the beast that it is today. New features were added with each release making it more powerful (and me more happy) with every upgrade.

So XMBC was evolving but my old Xbox wasn’t, and as the world moved towards HD my Xbox stared showing its age, struggling to play anything at high res. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to something more powerful... a computer... and thankfully, by that time the guys at XBMC had also noticed the hardware shortcomings of the original Xbox and they had produced three later versions (ports) of XMBC: Windows, Linux and Mac... Joy!

So with my newly built Home Theatre PC (HTPC) and a freshly downloaded version of the windows XBMC, my new media centre was ready to go!

With my love of XBMC I always had my ear to the ground for anything new happening in that arena. This resulted in me discovering another media centre operating system called Boxee. Being the XMBC advocate I am I was hesitant to even bother trying it out but upon doing more research I discovered that Boxee actually uses the core code of XBMC... Ok so I am now thinking that this Boxee thing is at least worth a try. And it was!

Boxee takes all the fantastic features of XMBC and combines it with some fresh thinking. The interface is improved to make it much more "girlfriend friendly" without losing any functionality, It introduces a social component so you can see what your friends are currently watching, it automatically downloads all your album/DVD covers plus supports add-on applications that further bump up the value of this open source software.

I now have Boxee running on three HTPC’s in my house and I'm over the moon with it! And yes I personally think it’s better than XBMC!

So if you are looking for something to do with that old PC that does nothing but collect dust, why not turn it into a media centre?! Simply install Boxee and you will have a media centre that towers over any commercial product in ease of use and functionality, plus of course it costs you a brass razoo!

To give you an taste of what Boxee can do, check out this video.