Monthly Archives: December 2008

Windows/Mac/Linux: Free Xbox Media Center (XBMC) spinoff boxee has updated with great news for Netflix lovers: The popular media center application now supports streaming Netflix Watch Instantly video to your boxee media center. There are, however, a couple of catches. First, the Netflix streaming only works on Macs (with Microsoft Silverlight installed), so Linux users are out of luck until Netflix begins supporting Linux. Second, those of you enjoying boxee on an Apple TV are also out of luck (for now) when it comes to Netflix streaming. Now for the good news. The boxee update also introduces a handful of great new feature improvements and bug fixes that everyone can enjoy, including:

• a new Hulu – looks more like hulu.com, enables you to login (so you can get your Hulu Queue), works faster, and playback should be greatly improved on Apple TV
• a new YouTube – new look, as well as higher quality video playback. some of these YouTube clips look pretty good on your 46” LCD
• a new CNN, Flickr, Picasa and Apple Movie Trailers – we’ve re-written all of these plug-ins to work faster and look better
• Boston Globe’s The Big Picture – it’s a great photo-blog, which we really like, and thought could be pretty cool in a 10-foot experience. if you’ll like it we could bring much more of these type of services (let us know!)
• integration with MTV Music – when you click on an album you’ll see a new option to let you watch music videos of the artist. check it out. MTV said they can give us higher quality videos, and we have a few more ideas for providing a great music video experience on boxee
• theWB – on our quest to bring more TV content to boxee is the latest addition. it means shows like Buffy, Babylon5, Firefly, One Tree Hill and The O.C. are now available on boxee

I've been playing around with the new boxee all morning, and it's a great update to the interface. If boxee has been buggy for you in the past, you may want to give this release another try, too—it features lots of behind the scenes code improvements as well.

Finally, to Windows users wondering why they’ve been included on this download: boxee has also released a pre-alpha for the Windows crowd to a couple hundred of new testers. While that means it’s not available to everyone yet, it hopefully will be very soon.

Windows/Mac OS X: Backup service Backblaze aims to take the hassle out of online backup by backing up only the data you need and ignoring unnecessary files like operating system files, applications, and temporary files. That way you don't have to get specific with Backblaze about everything you want to back up or exclude (though you can if you want)—it just backs up everything and excludes the data that’s not useful in backup form. The service does continuous backup, so files are always (hopefully) up to date, but you can switch to scheduled backups if you prefer. Like other popular backup tools, Backblaze does unlimited backup for a price: $5/month (similar to MozyHome) or $50/year (like Carbonite). A free trial of Backblaze is available if you’d like to try it out before committing. The app is available in Windows form to anyone; you’ll need to sign up for an invite if you want to try it on your Mac.

Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you’ve got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Free application DVDCoach burns any video file (like DivX or Xvid videos you’ve downloaded off BitTorrent) to a playable DVD. The application provides a simple front-end for converting the files to the proper format (using the very popular media conversion tool ffmpeg) and burning the results to a DVD. DVDCoach Express doesn't have many advanced features—for example, you can't create custom DVD menus—but what it lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity. Just drag and drop the videos you want to burn to DVD into the application, set the few preferences available (PAL or NTSC, aspect ratio, and quality), and get burning. If you're looking for a more robust feature set, check out how to burn any video file to a playable video DVD using other free apps. DVDCoach Express is a free download, Windows only.

Windows only (running Google Desktop): If you want access to your Gmail on your desktop (literally) without running a full-blown email client, now you can download the Gmail Google Desktop gadget. You’ll need the free Google Desktop software installed first, and then you can dock your Gmail gadget to the desktop to read, search, send, and star messages. The Gmail gadget offers the same keyboard shortcuts that web-based Gmail offers, too. You can even open multiple instances of the gadget and log each into a different Gmail account. The only complaint about the gadget? It doesn’t play a sound when new mail arrives. (Though you may thank Google for that one.) The Gmail gadget is a free download and works in conjunction with Google Desktop 5 for Windows only.