OK, enough politics for a while. I haven’t done a lot of tech/music blogging lately, which is what I originally was doing with this blog.

I have a Mac mini hooked up to my TV at home to use as a media center. Front Row is adequate for watching movies and TV shows, but I’ve always been a fan of XBMC (Xbox Media Center). A few years ago, my friend Paul and I hacked our Xboxes to run it. I really loved it for playing downloaded videos from torrents, or for ripping videos from DVDs. The only limitation was that it didn’t play HD stuff, and that was because the Xbox hardward just wasn’t powerful enought to do it. In the last few years, the code has been ported to Linux/PC/Mac, and projects like Boxee have been built on top of it.

Boxee is a social networking app for your media. You can sign up with your friends on there and see what they’ve been watching. You can have it report on Twitter what you’re watching, you can rate music with Last.fm. It does a pretty decent job of automatically taking a bunch of files labelled Dexter S01E02.avi, Dexter S02E04.avi, etc. and recognizing that they are Dexter, Season 1 Episode 2, and Season 2 Episode 4. It automagically goes out and gets the DVD cover art for both of the seasons and then shows you all the liner notes from it. Does the same thing with music. I have about 40 gb of Disney movies, and other kids movies for Anna and so when I pull that up, instead of a text list with computerese looking names, I get a nice list with the proper title of the video along with a shot of the cover of the DVD.

It also provides a great interface for watching clips from Hulu, Comedy Central, video podcasts, etc. without you having to launch Safari and then getting out a keyboard or mouse. It’s currently in alpha, but getting very close to beta. Check out this video for a demo:

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

If you sign up for it, make sure to add me as a friend.