Boxee the “WD Live TV” killer..

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boxee I somewhere read about this software a while ago called “Boxee”, it’s a new mediacenter software which can be downloaded for free from http://www.boxee.tv But with so much mediacenter software out there it got lost in the masses.  Anyway, recently I was reminded as D-Link is rattling their sable with the forthcoming release of the Boxee Box (well that is hardly going to be the name but still)..  It looks VERY interesting especially with a full qwerty keyboard being merged into the very neat remote that come with it, and it does seem somewhat more interesting than the WD Live TV (A LOT more apps/widgets) and a more finished design overall. It does indeed look interesting.  Boxee seem to be based upon XBMC (X-Box Media Center) http://xbmc.org/download (which I btw still use on my old trusty X-Box 1 Classic) Should you want to preview the experience you can download the free software for your pc/mac here http://www.boxee.tv/box A few notes though;
  • The box is generally good at recognizing your video and music files (even series etc), BUT if it does not recognize the media file (it does so from the naming of the file) it wont show it :-/  thus you will need to rename it to a naming convention it understands which seem silly and acquad.  From what I can tell it will be getting the data (including photos) from IMDB.
  • I had some issues getting it to accept a share on a Windows 2003 server, I could ‘bypass’ this by mapping the share as a drive letter on my Win 7 machine where I ran Boxee but I am still puzzled as to why it did not seem to accept a simple Windows Share.
  • A further cause of concern is, what data is reported back to the producers of this software!?  Do they get the complete list of my music, video etc. archives?  Sadly I don’t know which concerns me as you have to register to run the software 😐
dlink1boxee-box-remote A quick look at what formats it recognizes; Video:
  • Adobe Flash 10.1
  • H.264  (MKV, MOV)
  • VC-1
  • WMV
  • MPEG-1
  • MPEG-2
  • MPEG-4
  • AVI
  • Xvid
  • Divx
  • PCM/LPCM
  • VOB
Lyd:
  • MP3
  • WMA
  • WAV
  • AIFF
  • FLAC
  • AAC
  • DTS
  • Dolby Digital
  • Ogg Vorbis
Billeder:
  • JPEG
  • TIFF
  • BMP
  • PNG
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Adobe Flash Player v.10.1 beta download

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flashlogoSo if you want to be totally up-beat or perhaps are testing out Boxee then you will want to install the latest Adobe Flash Player (Boxee actually seem to require this), but no worries you can get it right here;

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Among other things this version will add HW acceleration, neat for Netbooks as compatible GFX cards now can assist in playing video and thus perhaps adding HD playback to your otherwise slow Atom processor (however this DO require a compatible GFX card to work like the Nvidia ION and others).

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Start / Stop services via WMI vbs

Here is how to start and stop a service via WMI calls from a .vbs;

'Start Service
strServiceName = "Alerter"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colListOfServices = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Service Where Name ='" & strServiceName & "'")
For Each objService in colListOfServices
    objService.StartService()
Next

'Stop Service
strServiceName = "Alerter"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colListOfServices = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Service Where Name ='" & strServiceName & "'")
For Each objService in colListOfServices
    objService.StopService()
Next
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