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"At the Boxee Beta Launch event tonight, Boxee showed off a ton of new features and enhancements for its media center with a social twist. Boxee officially launched in June of 2008, but it's really been in the last year that the software \u2014 and the company \u2014 has picked up some major, major steam.\nAlthough I couldn't be at the event in person (Adam Ostrow is representing for Team Mashable), I got a look at some of the new features and changes headed towards the platform. Boxee in beta is more streamlined, optimized to run on less powerful hardware and better integrates with digital content from multiple sources. Select users will start getting invites soon and the beta will open up to everyone at CES.\nLocal and Online Content Come Together\nBoxee is a great media center, but one of the areas that has always been problematic is system-wide searches. If you're like me, you have 4 TB of local media data running on a media server, but you also want to access your online options. Before, you used to have to search through everything separately, but the Boxee beta will let you search for content both local and online.\n\nPlus, you can now create a watch list for your TV shows or movies, and the next time Boxee finds content either online or in your local repository, it'll add it to your queue for easy playback.\nNew Design\nThe Boxee beta has received a big overhaul in the UI department. Apps can still designate their own look and feel, but TV shows, movies and photos have been redesigned, and the new look does a better job of taking advantage of a wide-screen.\n\n\nIn addition, the Boxee beta will introduce a global menu and shortcuts so that you can access your favorite shows or apps and also go to places quickly, with the click of a mouse or remote.\nBetter Performance\nRight now about 85 percent of Boxee's userbase is on the Mac. This makes sense, as Mac OS X was the first platform to support Boxee and the Apple TV was given new life as an inexpensive media box thanks to the ability to run Boxee via a patchstick.\nStill, Boxee's big goal is to be able to run on anything and everything. To that end, they have worked hard to make the Windows version of Boxee run better and on lower-performance hardware. Boxee switched its graphical backend form OpenGL to DirectX in order to take advantage of Direct X Video Acceleration. This means that the hard work can be put off on the graphics card instead of the processor, yielding better performance.\n\n\nBoxee also worked with NVidia in order to make the beta fly on the ION platform, taking advantage of DXVA and Flash 10.1. This means that you'll be able to run Boxee in 1080p on netbooks and other lower-cost devices.\nThe big hurdle with getting reliable Internet video on Atom processors has always been getting GPU accelerated support. Thanks to Flash 10.1, Flash should finally perform better. The fact that Boxee worked with NVidia to ensure that Boxee and ION will work great together means that the number of potential homemade Boxee Boxes just got really big and really inexpensive.\nComing in January\nWe know, we know \u2014 we want to play with the new Boxee Beta now, too. However, if you aren't lucky enough to be part of the experimental release program, you'll be able to play with Boxee Beta in full when it officially launches at CES 2010."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/12/07/boxee-beta-2/>