[Macworld]

Post your comments for Boxee: On beyond Hulu here

[jamus]

Boxee has been great, but Plex has been getting more of my attention lately. I really wish the two teams could join up.

[rab777hp]

As much as there are other options- boxee never will be able to recover from such a crippling blow

[hmurchison]

Kill your TV before it kills your brain.

[lh99]

Boxee's interface drives me crazy. If you're looking for a better designed piece of software, look at Plex instead; it has most of Boxee's power without the obnoxious social networking features and terrible user interface.

[jasonact]

"But Boxee’s completely alive on the Apple TV (where Hulu Desktop does you no good) and far from dead on the desktop. Hulu continues to work within Boxee in both cases."
Are you saying that you can actually get Hulu to work on Apple TV? I haven't gotten that to work in months! I can browse for a video, but without exception when I try to play a Hulu video, it gets stuck on the browser window and the video never plays. How are you able to play Hulu video on the Apple TV?!?

[Chris Breen]

jasonact said:

Are you saying that you can actually get Hulu to work on Apple TV? I haven't gotten that to work in months! I can browse for a video, but without exception when I try to play a Hulu video, it gets stuck on the browser window and the video never plays. How are you able to play Hulu video on the Apple TV?!?

I just tried it and it worked. Are you choosing Hulu Feeds? The old Hulu app doesn't work so you have to use the feeds.

[Chris Breen]

lh99 said:

Boxee's interface drives me crazy. If you're looking for a better designed piece of software, look at Plex instead; it has most of Boxee's power without the obnoxious social networking features and terrible user interface.

Boxee's interface can be crazy making. Plex is gorgeous but they don't seem to be nearly as aggressive about getting different kinds of content and encouraging development. I'm willing to put up with Boxee's sometime clumsy way of doing things in order to have access to more content.

[jasonact]

Yes. I'm using "Hulu Feeds", not the old app. I browse to the video I want, play it, and it shows the browser window and stays there. If I press play to bring up the commands menu, the counter is moving as if it is playing, but there is no video and no sound. I've tried reinstalling Boxee, but I got the say result. Do you think if I do a factory restore and start from scratch that might do the trick? I'd pretty much given up on it working, but if others have gotten it to work, that gives me hope! Now I just need to figure out what to do.

[lh99]

@Chris: It's true, Boxee seems to have a lot more developer activity due to its popularity. Since I just use streaming content from Hulu and Netflix occasionally -- I'm usually playing content from my own library -- Plex does the job for me. I do wish Plex had better Pandora support, though.

[kirkpro1]

I have completely switched over to Plex after fighting with Boxee for months. I have a lot of movies and tv shows on my hard drive thanks to eyetv. Until I can search by genre, Boxee is a no go. I don't understand why they took that feature out... it is actually what got me to install Boxee the first time.

[Chris Breen]

jasonact said:

>Do you think if I do a factory restore and start from scratch that might do the trick?

As long as you don't blame me if something horrible happens, sure ;)

Before you do, you might make sure that you have the latest version of Boxee, XBMC, and Launcher installed.

Note that anything you have on the Apple TV now will be wiped off it when you restore.

[jasonact]

Yes, I checked to make sure I had the latest and greatest of everything, but the problem persists, and yes, I'm aware of the implications of a full restore. I'm halfway through the process now, about to load the fresh patchstick onto the newly wiped and updated ATV. We'll see how this goes.

[jasonact]

Yeah! It worked! Full Restore + Fresh Patchstick = Hulu on Boxee success! Thanks for the inspiration, Chris.