Newman Zone

Browsing a UPnP share in Boxee

I finally got my two favorite apps working together: Boxee and Simplify Media. Last night, I installed Simplify 2.0 on my Mac Mini and iPhone 3G. In Simplify’s announcement of 2.0, they list “Broadcast to UPnP devices” among the new features. Since UPnP works with XBMC, I figured it might work with Boxee, although it’s really aimed at external hardware like Sonos and Roku.

After enabling UPnP sharing in the Simplify Media Preferences, I fired up Boxee and started poking around. Turns out, you can locate the Simplify share by choosing Settings > Media Sources > Network Sources > Add New Source. Boxee scans your network for available devices. If it doesn’t find anything, click Rescan Sources. For me, at least, Simplify showed up as a source called Music. Next, drill down, select a folder to monitor, and click Add Source. I selected All Playlists. Boxee prompts you to name the new source. I replaced the suggested name and clicked Add.

The only hitch is that, once you enable the Simplify source, it doesn’t appear with cover art like the Music > Artists section of Boxee. Instead, you’ll find it in Music > Browse. Still, if you absolutely have to have your iTunes playlists in Boxee, this is a pretty good workaround.

The folks at Boxee have done it again. The new Boxee Remote app for the iPhone, which finally got approval from Apple, far exceeded my expectations.

Like Apple’s own Remote app for the iPhone — could this be the reason for the approval delay? — the Boxee Remote enables you to control Boxee from anywhere in your home. (In my case, Boxee is installed on a Mac Mini connected to an HDTV.) I’ve tried other iPhone remotes, such as Air Mouse and Snatch, but nothing handles Boxee better than Boxee Remote.

The difference is Boxee Remote’s intuitive Gesture mode. After a little practice, you can use it without looking at your iPhone. Dragging up, down, right, and left navigates the Boxee application. If you flick the Boxee logo, it scrolls a list on Boxee, much like flicking a list of artists or contacts on the iPhone.

If you click “Now Playing,” you get a thumbnail preview of your media, a volume slider, and a play/pause toggle button — even in photo slideshows. If you click the thumbnail, a second slider appears, enabling you to jump to another section of a song, movie, or television show. For me, at least, this feature doesn’t appear to be functional yet.

Check out the following video for a demonstration:

I bought an HDTV and a Mac Mini last year for two reasons: to watch high-definition cable TV, and to view services like Netflix, Vongo, and Joost on a big screen. Since then, Vongo disappeared (Starz made a deal with Netflix instead), Joost discontinued its stand-alone application, and Hulu emerged as one of the most popular video sites. Suddenly, full-length movies and TV episodes were everywhere. Even the big three networks got involved: you could watch every episode of “Lost” on abc.com in streaming HD video, and it looked amazingly good on a high-definition television.

Then there was a flurry of set-top boxes: Apple TV, Roku Netflix, Blockbuster OnDemand, SlingCatcher - you name it.

But the promise of TV/Internet convergence seemed no closer to reality. After all, who wants to buy a different set-top box for every service? And who wants to visit a dozen different web sites to find the movie or television show you want to watch?

Enter Boxee. Finally, a company that gets it.

What’s the big deal about Boxee?

• Ease of use - You can navigate using a keyboard, a mouse, an Apple Remote, and (soon) even an iPhone app.
• Content aggregation - You can watch video from ABC, CBS, Netflix, YouTube, CNN, Comedy Central, Joost, and many other web sites without using a browser.
• Downloadable content - Boxee includes a built-in BitTorrent client (rTorrent) and a torrent RSS reader.
• Podcasts - You can stream audio and video podcasts, although you cannot yet subscribe to them.
• Internet radio - You can listen to SHOUTcast and Last.fm (no Pandora yet).
• Captioning - You can enable subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org and lyrics from LyricWiki.org.
• Social networking - You can see what your friends are watching, rate movies, TV shows, and music, and recommend content to your friends.

You can do some of this in iTunes, Apple TV, Front Row, or XBMC, but to do it all in one place, you need Boxee (watch demo).

So is Boxee the next killer app?

The short answer is, not yet. But Boxee is still an alpha product, and it’s arguably better than the competition, including iTunes 8 and XBMC, upon which Boxee is based.

And because Boxee is open-source, there’s a good chance it will get the features it needs to put it over the top. Here’s my wishlist:

1. Add true fast-forward, rewind, and scrubbing. Right now, you can only skip backward and forward 30 seconds at a time.
2. Add a resume feature for movies and TV shows, so you can pick up where you left off.
3. Fix the Music section. I’ve had Boxee for over a week and it’s still indexing my iTunes library.
4. Enable manual editing of media files (and expose file names and directories to power users). Boxee is pretty good, but it wasn’t able to find an Otis Redding documentary from 2007, and it misidentified half a dozen MP3 albums. Right now, Boxee thinks Frank Sinatra is Frankie Carl, and George Harrison is Mose Allison, and there’s no way to manually override media titles and box art.
5. Add search! I’m sure this is on Boxee’s roadmap, but when you have hundreds of artists, scrolling with a remote is tedious.
6. Add playlist support. Boxee has already said this is coming, but I hope they also include the ability to generate playlists on the fly.
7. Add a toggle fullscreen button. If you’re using a remote, you don’t want to fish out the keyboard just to press Cmd+F.
8. Get rid of the firewall nag every time Boxee starts up.
9. Add more screensaver options (e.g., box art, now playing, recommendations). The default screensaver is giving me the willies.
10. Add built-in support for CD and DVD ripping. Maybe a Handbrake plugin?

You can make your own feature requests by visiting the Boxee forum and support sites. Or send them a tweet.

I have high hopes for Boxee. As alpha software, it’s already simpler, stabler, and easier to use than other HTPC solutions. It can only get better.

Of course, there’s one problem Boxee will never solve: making it easy to connect to your TV. Unless they build a Boxee set-top box.

While looking for a way to update my Twitter and Facebook status at the same time, I came across Ping.fm. This service, still in beta, enables to you post to up to 30 social networks using email or IM.

Like most betas, many features are still under development, and documentation is sparse. However, after some trial and error, I found some good uses for it.

Text to Ping.fm

SMS isn’t supported natively, but there are  decent workarounds. I opted for the AIM TXT approach, which requires the following steps:

1. Get an AIM verification code from Ping.fm.
2. Send a text message to 246246 (AIMAIM):
   send pingfm [your_verification_code]
3. You should receive this text reply: “pingfm: (using AOL IM) Thanks! Your Ping.fm account is now set up to post messages through aim. Send me a message any time and I’ll post it for you.” At this point, you may want to add 246246 to your phone’s contacts.
4. To send a message to Ping.fm, simply text 246246 and specify pingfm as the recipient:
   send pingfm [your_status_message]

If  Step 2 doesn’t work, make sure you haven’t registered a different AIM screen name with Ping.fm. This is the mistake I made. When you send an instant message via AIM TXT, your AIM screen name is your mobile phone number (e.g., 12125551212), not your regular AIM screen name (even if you’ve associated a mobile number with your account). Unfortunately, you can only register one AIM screen name at a time with Ping.fm.

NOTE: If you’re using Facebook, you also have to install the Ping.fm application.

Phone to Ping.fm

There’s no native iPhone application for Ping.fm, but you can visit their iPhone or mobile site with your phone’s browser. This is a good option if you don’t have an unlimited text plan.

Instant Message to Ping.fm

If you’re using AIM TXT (see above), you cannot use AIM to update your Ping.fm status. But you can get verification codes for other, popular instant messaging services, such as Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger. I enabled Google Talk by following these steps:

1. Get a Jabber verification code.
2. Add pingbot@ping.fm to your Google Talk (or Gmail) buddy list.
3. Send an instant message to this new buddy containing only the Jabber verification code: 
   verify-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
4. You should receive this reply: “Thanks! Your Ping.fm account is now set up to post messages through Jabber. Send me a message any time and I’ll post it for you.”
5. You can send normal messages to this new buddy, or use a trigger to specify a specific service. For example, this message updates only your Twitter status:
   @tt Writing a blog post about Ping.fm

One nice feature of Ping.fm is the Adjust Grammar option, which you can enable in Settings. When you do this and post to Ping.fm using one of the methods above, your post is prefixed with “said:” on Facebook (as in, “Paul Newman said: Writing a blog post about Ping.fm”). Hopefully it will be possible to edit this prefix, or define different posting options using custom triggers, in the future.