Media center application Boxee has grabbed a lot of headlines over the past year or two, and for good reason: Boxee provides Mac, Linux, and Windows users with an excellent solution for watching internet video on a TV. While web browsers were generally designed for viewing text and images with video thrown in as an afterthought, Boxee was designed to look and feel more like a consumer electronics application that you can navigate from the couch with a remote control.

Boxee can access online video from services including Hulu, Joost, and BBC's iPlayer. You can use it to enjoy audio and video podcasts. And you can access local media stored on your hard drive.

But despite all of its features, Boxee is still alpha software. That's going to change next month. Boxee is set to launch the first beta version of its software at an event in New York on December 7th. I suppose the day will continue to live in Infamy, although I doubt that decades from now we'll still be talking about it as the date that Boxee went beta.

The new version will have a new user interface, improved navigation, a user-controlled queue, and a new TV and movie search function among other changes.

It was pretty exciting news at Download Squad to hear Orb, the "sort of software version of Slingbox," was available for Mac. Orb allows you to broadcast your media to any device that has a web browser. After downloading Orb to your "always on" Mac with a high speed internet connection, you can access all your photos, songs, TV shows, and videos from any device with a browser and media player.

After downloading the app, Orb indexes your media and then prompts you to either log in to mycast.orb.com, or create a log in if you don't have an account. After you log in you can see your dashboard and all your media goodies.


Though my songs appeared immediately, my photos did not. There are various feed settings you can play with and channels to explore. Also, with a simple drag drop interface you can share your media with your friends via email, SMS, widget on your blog, or a public URL.


Checking it out from my home computer is one thing, but would it work on other devices? Success! I was able to access my media from my Dell PC.

A note for iPhone owners: The esteemed and indefatigable Jay Hathaway noted that he received errors when he tried to download the free version of OrbLive for the iPhone, which he tried from both his iPhone and his iTunes account on his Mac. There are 3 flavors of Orb available for the iPhone: OrbLive free, OrbMedia ($4.99) and OrbLive ($9.99)

Note to Orb: Please update your landing page to include PC and Mac, ok?

US electronics retailer Best Buy is preparing to enter the digital video distribution business in a big way. The company is partnering with CinemaNow, an online video download service that lets users rent and purchase movies and TV shows.

Best Buy will load up CinemaNow software on internet-connected consumer electronics sold at the company's retail stores. That includes computers, portable media players, Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes, mobile phones, and internet-connected television sets.

Customers that purchase one of these items will be able to rent or buy videos from a catalog with about 22,000 titles. Movie purchases typically run between $10 and $20, while TV shows are $1.99 per episode. Movie rentals typically go for $2.99 to $3.99.

The move should give Best Buy and CinemaNow a much stronger foothold in the digital media space. CinemaNow already offers a pretty compelling user experience, allowing you to download a video and watch it on up to three devices. But the fact that virtually every consumer electronics device that Best Buy sells that can run the software soon will, means that CinemaNow is about to become a much bigger name in digital media, and that could help the companies take on Apple's iTunes and Amazon's video on demand services.

Best Buy is expected to roll out the new service early next year.

As I mentioned yesterday, internet movie channel Epix launched this weekend. The TV channel is available to Verizon FiOS customers, who can also login to the EpixHD web site to watch dozens of movies including new releases such as Iron Man and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as well as older, more obscure titles including Bubba Ho Tep and Son of Rambow.

If you don't have Verizon FiOS you can request a 3-day weekend trial of the service, but I'm not entirely sure what the point is, since Epix doesn't plan to launch a web-only version anytime soon. Perhaps they're hoping you'll contact your local cable, satellite, or other TV provider and request they add Epix to the lineup.

If your invitation hasn't come through yet, you can take solace in the fact that I did score an invite. OK, that may not be much comfort, but I did manage to grab a bunch of screenshots of the user interface. It's kind of a mixed bag right now. The search function works quite nicely and you can click the watch button from the drop-down menu that appears when you're searching for a movie -- if the movie is available. Unfortunately, there are a ton of listings for movies that you can't actually watch yet, including Star Trek, GI Joe, and The Godfather I, II, and III.

You can also browser for movies by most watched, newest, genre, or other collections. You can also see all the movies from A to Z.

Browsing is sort of a cumbersome task though, since you have to scroll through thumbnails of movie posters. If it's not clear what movie you're looking at, you can mouse over the cover to see the title, but it may take a moment for the title to show up. And in the genre section, many movies are listed more than once (for example, the same title might show up in comedy, award winners, and action). And it's clear the web site wasn't really designed for geeks, because the sci fi category is dead last, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling before you get to it.

On the bright side, video quality was pretty good and you can even click a button to check your bitrate and other settings, which are automatically adjusted based on your internet connection settings.

If you're not a FiOS customer, you can still request an invite to check out the service. Just sign up at EpixHD.com/invite and you'll register for a 3-day weekend trial of the internet-only service. The invites are being given out on a first come first, served basis, so you might not get one right away. But Epix plans to offer invitations between now and Thanksgiving.

Epix is run by Viacom, Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM, so the company has access to a decent collection of movies, although it looks like most of the titles available at launch are older movies.

[via NewTeeVee]

There are dozens of great programs for converting media files from one format to another. Some of our favorites are Super, MediaCoder, and WinLAME, and VirtualDub.But if you're looking for a fast and simple solution, you probably won't find many programs that are as simple to use as Oxelon Media Converter.

Oxelon adds two shortcuts to your Windows context menu: one for transcoding audio files, the other for transcoding video. All you have to do is right-click on any media file in Windows Explorer and select the file format you want to convert it to. Oxelon will open a new window and ask you where you'd like to save the file. You can also change audio and video codecs, framerate, bitrate, and video dimensions as well as other settings. But all you really have to do at that point is hit the "Conversion" button to start converting your file.

The free program does have a few quirks. The most annoying one is that every time you close the program, Oxelon Media Converter will open its homepage in your default web browser. The other is that I had trouble converting some of the video files I had shot with my digital camera. The only way I could get them to encode was by selecting the "no audio" option, although it's possible that if I had spent more time fiddling I could have found another option that would have worked. Admittedly, my digital camera records audio at an odd sampling rate.

Oxelon recommends downloading and installing a plugin file to add support for a wide variety of audio and video formats. You can find a picture of the settings screen after the break.

[via Instant Fundas]

A colleague and I gave the app a trial run today and we liked it. After downloading and installing (7.9 MB Mac and Windows) the beta, Libox prompts you to import your files from your computer. The UI is clean, minimalist and intuitive. After importing your media files from your computer, you can share them by email with your friends and groups. Your friends will also have to install the app to open the files you send.

Libox allows you to sync your media files with all the computers in your house. There is also a web app where you can access your media in your browser, however, it is in alpha and can only be used on your local computer and if it is not behind a firewall.

To accomplish all this, Libox uses a combination of P2P networking, cloud and grid computing. It does not store your media or metadata on their servers and when you share media with your friends, Libox creates a "private secure network" on those specific files with those specific friends. The files are received in their original format, no compression, resizing or degradation.

Many questions abound, like how will this service make money? Once out of beta, will it be a paid service? What about the private secure networks? How private and how secure? The web access in alpha - how will that work? What are the compatible file formats? Any plans to add other file types like EPS or Docs? Does Libox work with Linux? Tell us more about the company and mission. Is their plan complete world domination? Is Libox too good to be true?

Stay tuned. Hopefully, we'll get these answers and more if you leave your questions in the comments.

Using YouTube to listen to music is nothing new. Search for a song you want to hear, and you're very likely to find it, even if there's no official music video. YouTube isn't built to listen to music though, and that's where TubeRadio.fm comes in. It's a slick music player that lets you create playlists from YouTube, and can even find entire albums at once, using track listings and album art from Last.fm. The TubeRadio homepage describes the service as "iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify," and that's not much of exaggeration.

TubeRadio.fm puts more emphasis on the "radio" than the "tube": the videos themselves take up very little space in the UI. More space is devoted to the tabbed info box at the bottom of the screen, which automatically pulls up lyrics and artist bios. TubeRadio does a good job of getting the album versions of songs when you use 'Discography Mode' to grab whole albums, but occasionally it will find a live version instead. Fortunately, there's another mode that searches all of YouTube, and you can manually add the version you want, if it exists.

Yfrog, one of the most popular photo-posting services for Twitter, is making a move into video and offering webcam support. You can record and tweet, right from the Yfrog site. To get started, check the space where you'd normally see the option to upload an image or enter a URL: the new webcam option has been added right next to those. When the video window pops up, you can record a video, take a still shot, or take a still shot on a 5 second delay.

As always with Yfrog, the photos and videos you take are only a click away from being posted to Twitter. Because Yfrog is already one of the top players in the Twitter photo uploading game, and supported in several major Twitter apps, there's a good chance it could start to dominate the Twitter video arena, too. Currently, Twitvid and Twiddeo are two of the most popular options.

[via CNET]

Let me begin with some common knowledge to put us on some common ground. Vista sucks. By association, DirectX10 sucks. In fact, you might not even know what DirectX is -- and you would be forgiven!

DirectX is the piece of software that sits between your computer, and your video games. If you don't play games, you won't have heard of it. When you play a game on your PC it goes through DirectX. And until now, that's all DirectX did.

It's true: DirectX 10 premiered some nice new technologies. But because they were only available on Vista, which as we all know sucked more than a Hoover with a fresh, high-suction bag, DirectX 11 will be the first time most of us get to experience these new, funky technologies.

Why make a streaming service Netflix' first offering outside the US? 'Tricky' postal systems, says CEO Reed Hastings.

Now, this is a bit of an odd one. Most western nations already have DVD-by-mail systems that work just as well as (or better) than Netflix. So I don't think 'tricky' postal systems are the real reason behind this move. What then do Netflix intend to achieve by focusing on streaming content outside of the US? Is it just a matter of flexibility? More subscription options?

But again, why outside the US? Netflix's brand recognition outside the US is not great.

Hastings and Netflix claim there is still seemingly enough demand for such a service, with 42% of their subscribers watching at least "15 minutes of one TV show or movie in the last quarter." Readwriteweb point to the growing adoption of Hulu and BBC's iPlayer for TV, Pandora and Spotify for music -- but I don't think it's quite the same thing for movies.

People like using their big, wide-screen televisions. They like using their expensive sound set-ups. Set-top boxes that stream content from the Web are still relatively hard to come by and not readily adopted by consumers. Then there's the matter of bandwidth: streaming a movie in high-resolution with a surround-sound audio track is still way beyond the capacity of most American and European Internet connections.

Netflix haven't yet announced which country will get to trial their streaming-movie service, but it'll be interesting to see which one they choose -- and if it will indeed be successful.

[via Readwriteweb]

Hulu is quite simply one of the best ways to watch TV on the internet. In fact, in some ways, Hulu offers a better viewing experience than old fashioned TV. For example, you tend to have just 2-3 minutes of commercials to put up with when watching a one hour (or rather, 42 minute) program on Hulu, instead of 18 minutes of advertisements.

But partly for that reason, FOX, NBC, ABC, and the other content networks that are supplying Hulu with a steady stream of TV shows and movies aren't making as much money from the site as they do when that content is viewed on TV. And according to FOX News Corp deputy chairman Chase Carey, one way to address that issue is to start charging for Hulu content. '

Now, before you freak out, it's not entirely clear at the moment exactly what content would be moved behind a paid firewall. It's unlikely that Hulu would require users to pay to watch everything on the site. But it is possible that some exclusive content could be available only to paying subscribers or one-time viewers.

Of course, it's possible that the forces behind Hulu could go all out and treat itself like a cable network, requiring users to pay to view anything on the site -- at which point Hulu's audience would sharply decline while internet piracy would shoot up.

What do you think? Is there some content you would pay to see on Hulu? Or are you already paying for that content from iTunes, Amazon, or other internet video distributors?

[via TV Squad]

While much of the Download Squad audience is already well-educated about Windows 7, there are still many of you who might not know what all the fuss is about. Over the next week or two, you're going to be seeing and hearing a lot about Microsoft's new operating system, so our team is going to help bring you up to speed.

So what's all the fuss about? All the badmouthing aimed at Windows Vista made plenty of consumers stay away last time. Don't think Microsoft is unaware of that fact. They know, and they worked pretty hard to make sure that Windows 7 was "Vista done right."

What's different about Windows 7 - and what makes it better? Who better to answer those questions than Microsoft?

The Internet Movie Database turned 19 yesterday. If you're scratching your head wondering how the IMDb can be older than the web, you'll notice that the first initial is I, not W. That's because the iconic destination for information about films and TV shows actually predates the web.

In fact, the earliest version of the technology behind the IMDb was a set of scripts for searching the USENET group rec.arts.movies. The IMDb wasn't even named yet, but it was already a work in progress on October 17, 1990.

The web site today is a bit more full featured. Not only can you get biographies for actors, directors, writers, and producers, as well as biographies, filmographies, and brief descriptions of movies, but you can also get TV listings, movie rankings, entertainment news, message boards, and the ability to watch some movies and TV shows from the site.

[via TechCrunch]

Interview Project by David Lynch is an online series of interviews with Americans from different walks of life, in various towns and cities all over America. Beginning October 20, the project will launch a community blog, incorporating Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so fans will be able to upload their own original content.

Austin Lynch (David's son) and a friend set out on a roadtrip across America and back to get the people's story from everyday Americans. They covered 20,000 miles in 70 days and got stories that are notable for the fact they are real, organic and unrehearsed. Production wise, they have the unmistakable Lynch feel, you keep looking for something that may be hidden. I watched 4 of the interviews and enjoyed spotting the Lynch symbols - close ups of flowers, bird chirps, etc. It will be fun to get to see how the conversations flow once the blog opens up a richer dialogue.

The blog launch will coincide with the premiere of the Clinton interview, a Fayetteville, WV man who finds salvation through a Stevie Nicks concert. For laughs, check out Lynch below NSFW (language) talking about watching movies on iPhones.

To him, it just ain't the real thing.