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Oh, I agree wholeheartedly on the software side. I've got both it and "Hulu Desktop" on my media machine (a recycled A64 4000+ with a 9500 GT) and it's definately the better behaved of the two (gee, no flash involved, wonder why it's better?)

I actually ended up canceling my cable TV thanks to services like these and ponied up for a 22mbps downstream speed instead. Why pay $120/mo for 340 channels I don't want just to get the ten channels I want - when I can watch all the same programming online for free atop a Internet connection I'm already paying for anyways?

I keep going back to hulu though since I think Boxee would be a billion times better if I could sort by name and if the damned thing didn't keep saying I was region locked emptying every single list in it... or if it had aspect ratio controls WHILE playing media... or if their website worked right in anything other than firefox and appear to go off to never-never land every time you try to log in.

I love the IDEA, but compared to HULU their implementation is total rubbish - at least if you live in the US.

Edited 2010-01-08 04:24 UTC

Oh yeah, I think the alpha label is/was very deserved, but hopefully it will shape up as time goes on. At the moment it's pretty flakey and I often have to delete the configuration files because it's made the BBC iplayer channel vanish somehow or whatever. I have high hopes for it in the future though, especially once it's better able to take advantage of the NVidia VDPAU capabilities which seem quite unstable right now. I am running it on an nVidia Ion/Atom 230 fanless machine so I could really do with the extra power of GPU decoding for 1080p H.264 content.

I don't know about Hulu desktop, I live in Britain (as you probably guessed from the mention of BBC) so for me Hulu is not available.

My media is sorted by folders and file names by default (as I prefer it) so I'm puzzled why yours isn't sorted by name also.
And the region locking (if I understand your problem correctly) can be easily disabled in the setting (on the Alpha release anyway - not installed beta yet...)

Agreed that their web site isn't the most intuitive of sites, but I do think you're overstating it's problems somewhat (or at least, I've been lucky enough not to experience as much difficulty as you've stated)

While I see you're point re: aspect ratio, I've found that Boxee's ratio were 99.9% of the time the same as what I would have manually chosen had I specifically gone into manually choose what ratio I wanted. So I've been rather lucky there too.

Not tried (or even heard of) Hulu until now - so I might give it a play this weekend.
but thus far I've been /very/ happy with Boxee - even in spite of it feeling rather 'alpha' at times.

That said: It's rare that I stumble across a piece of software that more or less suites me perfectly with it's default, "out of the box", configuration. So please forgive me if I sound slightly biased / the wearer of rose-tinted glasses hehe

The beta has that now .