XBMC Vs Boxee: Freeware open source media centers

By Sriram Sharma

posted Mar 26th 2010 at 1:31PM | Filed under: Pc & Laptop » Software

If you want to turn an old PC, laptop or netbook into a home theater, you don't need to look further than these two freeware media center apps. Both are award media winning software, work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX; highly customisable and skinnable, with extensive support for a variety of video and music codecs, picture formats, subtitles and physical media. Both the apps can scan your video and music folders, and scrape DVD and album thumbnails out of online databases for all your media. Over time, your media center will have a much more improved look and feel thanks to these thumbnails provided you have an internet connection on your HTPC. Best of all, both have a load of freeware remote apps that can work on a Wi-Fi network with an Android phone or tablet, an iPhone or an iPod touch. So you can actually sit back on your couch, load up a movie without touching a keyboard or mouse.

Boxee: Boxee's social networking services set it apart from XBMC. Friends using Boxee can follow each other's usage activity, and send music usage stats to Last.fm. You can also export media activity to Friendfeed, Twitter, or Tumblr, Through these services you can broadcast your Boxee activity to Facebook as well. For those using broadband, Boxee can also stream Internet video streams like Revision 3, CNET, YouTube, Comedy Central, MTV Music, and others. What hurts: Boxee's indexing capabilites are not very good, even after explicitly adding my music and movie folders in my local hard drive, it doesn't show up in the Videos or Music menu. Every time I wanted to see a movie, I had to to to the Files tab and seek out the media file through a labyrinth of menus. Boxee is available as an app on Jolicloud, and works well on nettops and netbooks. It's optimised to work on the weakest of machines, and is lively on an Atom.

XBMC: XBMC was first created as a mod for the first Xbox game console, so it should work well on any old PC with comparable specs. Any old 1GHz PC should work if you want to play DVD rips or music, for high definition videos. You need a Core 2 Duo for 1080p rendering through CPU, XBMC also has hardware accelerated video decoding for anyone using Broadcom Crystal HD decoder or VDPAU GPU hardware on Linux. An ION powered setup would of course be a lot faster and slicker in terms of graphics and rendering speed, and would be capable of playing 1080 HD videos. It's the most ideal platform for an HTPC, but it cannot be easily tacked on. Which is why we are interested in the Broadcom option, as you can use a nettop or netbook to make a HD capable media center box at a really low price. You can also run the XBMC Media center straight from a USB drive or hard disk, which means that your collection of favourite movies and music will appear with thumbnails and assorted infoon any PC you plug it into.

A trailer of the XBMC on an ION HTPC: The UI is blazing fast!

Boxee using an iPod Touch as a remote:

PHOTOGALLERY

TAGS:

Boxee, Broadcom Crystal HD, freeware, HTPC, Linux, Media Center, Remote, VDPAU, XBMC

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	XBMC Vs Boxee: Freeware open source media centers http://technoholik.com/news/pc_laptop/software/xbmc-... If you want to turn an old PC, laptop or netbook into a home theater, you don't need to look...