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The Home Theatre Kerfuffle

As CTO of the family, I vetoed the idea of getting cable television when we moved since we never used it in Lincoln. We received our television over the internet through a platform called Boxee. We had Boxee installed on a Mac Mini that sat under the television for the past two to three years or so, and it gave us all the television we needed.

Recently, the powers that be at Boxee decided to release its final version of software that is installable on the PC/Mac/Linux. With this software release, the most notable change, for us, was that they dropped support for Netflix. We use Netflix with Boxee quite a bit, so we had to find a new solution.

What I needed was support for Netflix, but also support for access to various media types over the local area network because we have many of our shows and movies available in that form ever since our physical media minimization. Boxee was based on XBMC, so I played with that first. There was a sort of Netflix app, but it was not very intuitive. Basically, it opened Firefox to the Netflix address of the movie. From there I would have had to use a mouse to fullscreen it and that was not the kind of solution I was looking for.

I also considered going with Roku at one point which I hear has excellent support for Netflix and Hulu, but the network browsing support I found seemed pretty involved, which I would love to work with if I had time, but Roku would also mean more expense. We have already invested in the Mac Mini as our media center, and I would like to stick with not spending money.

What I found to meet my needs is Plex.

Plex has most of the same apps that Boxee had available, though Plex calls them Video Plug-ins (which I personally find to be a cumbersome way of stating it). Plex even has Hulu, which Boxee stopped supporting long ago.

There are some features that Boxee had that I will miss. While one of them is that Boxee hardly ever crashed (and Plex does more than I like), the other would have to be the social experience. I could connect Boxee with Twitter and Facebook and see any videos shared in either of those streams right on the Boxee home screen. That was handy, and Plex does not have a similar feature.

What Plex has over Boxee however, is that I can browse through the menus on my iPhone (or iPad) to get what I want to watch. Then I just tell Plex to play it. I do not have to (although I can) go through menus with the arrow keys of an infrared remote to the television to get to the video I want to watch. I can do all the folder browsing on the Plex iPhone app and just tell it to play on the television, or the television in the treadmill room, or right there on my phone or tablet. I think that this method is much more intuitive than the traditional 'arrow a cursor around the television screen' method. It is a bit like what Apple TV is trying to be with the AirPlay stuff, but was around long before Apple TV came along for the ride.

Plex also has a search feature that is available either on the television screen or on the remote app which not only searches the libraries on your local area network, but also applies the search term to any videos available from the various 'plug-ins' that you have installed. It works great for finding out if something is available on Hulu before I try to pira.... uh.... find another source.

If you are one of those home theater PC types who has a computer under the monitor you call your television, I recommend giving Plex a try.
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