Boxee media centre launches for Windows

Open-source software's public alpha unveiled

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24 June 2009 16:50 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Boxee, the open source media centre software, has announced that a public alpha of its application is now available for Windows. Previously, the software only worked on Macs and Linux-based PCs.

On top of that, the platform now supports a whole load more applications than it previously did. Digg, Tumblr, Current and Major League Baseball have been added as content suppliers. A whole host of bugs have also been fixed.

The software's primarily designed for installing on a PC that you've got connected to a big television. It features the "10-foot user interface" much beloved of UI designers.

It'll be going toe-to-toe on the Windows platform with Microsoft's own Windows Media Centre but Boxee adds streaming media, a social network and application platform.

Also, Boxee is controllable via the iPod touch and iPhone. A remote control application can be found in the App Store. Boxee says that if there's enough interest, then the company might consider a more full-featured iPhone application too.

In our brief testing, we found Boxee's Windows Alpha to look very polished, but we had trouble running iPlayer and experienced a smattering of crashes. We wouldn't recommend installing it on your parents' media centre PC quite yet.

The service is due to move out of beta in September. We're looking forward to seeing if they're able to squish some of those bugs, because the potential for Boxee is big.