New Alpha Version of Boxee Adds Netflix

A new alpha version of Boxee is available which adds Netflix support and updates the look and performance of the application.

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the good news: you can now access Netflix on boxee, get your Instant Queue and Recommendations, browse Recently Added and Most Popular, sift through the entire Netflix Watch Instantly selection by Genre and Search.

the bad news: we could not make it run on Apple TV ☹ . we tried real hard. vulkanr was almost able to tame it, but he was bucked by the Apple TV’s 1Gz processor. it screamed back at him in thick Scots brogue, “I can’t do it captain, I just don’t have the power!” we’re still working on it, but don’t have a solution, yet.. also there is no Netflix for Ubuntu, yet (i believe Netflix mentioned they will support Linux later in 2009).


the latest version of the alpha is not just about Netflix, though. there is also:
- 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 theWB is the latest addition. it means shows like Buffy, Babylon5, Firefly, One Tree Hill and The O.C. are now available on boxee

on the bug fixing/polish front:
- support for skip forward, rewind in Hulu, CBS, etc. – this is a big one.. should work now. the code behind it is sooo ugly that yuvalt had to chew on anti-nausea tablets while writing it
- improved streaming of podcast, trailers and youtube videos – we rewrote the buffering/caching mechanism. Skip and rewind within video streams is now much better
- more boxee less crashee – it’s still alpha, and it will crash from time to time (we promise), but this version is supposed to be more stable. we are trying to weed out those nasty bugs - help us out by submitting bugs to support@boxee.tv or post in our forum
- faster scanning of local/network media – your movies, tv shows and albums should be identified faster. if you have a huge music collection then you could still cook a 7-course dinner, wash the dishes and read a telephone book before it will be done, but it’s greatly improved..
- new on-screen keyboard – as dave described when he reported the bug “typing a URL with our on-screen keyboard is a once in a lifetime experience. you do it once, and never want to do it again”. so we made it a bit better
- faster loading of the movies/music screen in case you have hundreds or thousands of albums..
- fixes and new look for to the lyrics and subtitles features – the new auto-scroll of the lyrics is arbitrary… but sometimes it works pretty well. fooled me the first time I tried it
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