Boxee: Multimedia meets Facebook

Boxee merges social networking abilities with a robust multimedia player.

Nothing is as awkward that water cooler conversation where you're trying to tell a work colleague about that fabulous show you watched on the telly last night. Their eyes start to glaze over and worse still, your fascinating description makes it sound like an afternoon watching Parliament TV.

Enter Boxee - a rather clever bit of free media centre software that runs on Macs, Apple TVs, and even Linux, (and in the not too distant future, Windows PCs).

Essentially the lovechild of a media centre and Facebook, Boxee lets you watch video, listen to audio or view photos stored on networked PCs and disk drives or even stream content from one of the vast number of video content services on the internet.

The internet video streaming feature on Boxee is very, very cool indeed. Using Boxee I was able to pull a huge range of movies, TV shows and documentaries from sources such as Joost, YouTube and a seemingly endless number of Podcasters.

Cool video aside, Boxee comes into its own with some really hoopy social networking features. Not content with being able to play nearly kind of audio or video file in the known universe, Boxee aspires to be the media centre equivalent of Facebook by being able to tell you what nominated Boxee friends are watching, and even cooler still, lets you recommend video or music to them.

Logging into Boxee takes you to a start screen which gives up a list of media you've recently used, as well as a list of what Boxee friends are watching and think that you should also watch. Being able to fire up Joost to watch some video, I'm also able to share what I've listened to or watched. Very cool indeed, and best of all, no more awkward water cooler conversations.

After installing Boxee on an Apple TV I'd hooked up to my Samsung LCD telly, I settled in with to play with Boxee. First up I checked out its internet Videos feature which worked pretty well. Aside from having to wait for video footage to buffer, browsing video content from YouTube, CNN and Atlantis Sci-Fi worked seamlessly. All video sources are streamed and more importantly are legit, future proofing you from any looming copyright legislation.

All told there are at least 20 channels on Boxee. Unfortunately, some of the better channels don't work in New Zealand – this isn't really the fault of Boxee – unfortunately the BBC and Hulu are unavailable to users outside their countries of origin.

Video quality is ok, but certainly isn't Freeview or Sky HD. Whilst lower quality than conventional TV, streamed video over Boxee was definitely watchable.

Using the Apple TVs remote, navigating my way around Boxee's menus was sometimes a little clunky, however this was easily fixed by jumping onto the Apple application store and downloading the free Boxee remote control application for the iPod touch or iPhone.

Doing this made a huge difference, making chores such as typing text into dialog boxes or finding my way around Boxee significantly faster and easier.

If you've got a large collection of music and video clips or want a legit means of accessing TV shows and other content over the internet, Boxee is not only a free download but is definitely worth a try.