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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.

I had the same problem (re the BBC iplayer channel disappearing) and after some googling found that it was down to a bug in the regional settings.

If you're still running the alpha, go to the settings screen and then (IIRC) general settings and from there un-select the opinion to hide apps that aren't available in your region.
The iPlayer app should then reappear without having to delete your config files

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

Well, remember the two are not the same thing - Hulu is a free online video service that has a standalone program... Boxee is a general purpose media player that can provide free online content.

Most of my complaints are in regards to free online content and not accessing my local content - since that's all I care about for a program like this.

Playing back local/LAN content? That's what Media Player Classic HT is for... but then I HATE these slow 'libary' type interfaces (like iTunes) because I do this really retarded thing and name all my files sensibly and put them into well organized folders - so what the **** do I need Library indexing or dozens of meaningless fields nobody bothers to fill out anyways?

(Yes, I'm the BeOS fan who didn't understand what was such a big deal about the extra information in the filesystem nobody actually bothered to fill out for each file anyhow)

Edited 2010-01-08 22:36 UTC

The beta has that now .