#BOXEE BOX HACKED MAC OS#
#BOXEE BOX HACKED CODE#
#BOXEE BOX HACKED MAC#

However, it became clear pretty early on that I had different goals and vision for the project than the XBMC team did, so we ended up forking the code to become Plex not too long afterwards.ĬG: Oh man, I remember OSXBMC! I remember the day it became Plex, too.Įlan: Do you remember all the shit I got about the name?Įlan: That was a pretty hard time emotionally for me, just because of all the work i was doing on the code and all the strife and vitriol.ĬG: Wow, OK. Over the next few months, I made some early releases of the port, which I’d called “OSXBMC”.

#BOXEE BOX HACKED MAC#

When I posted a progress report with screenshots about progress on the Mac port, I was contacted by the XBMC team, and brought on their team.

Currently we have about five developers working on the different aspects of Plex. My wife was out of town and I was bored, basically. I used XBMC for a few years on an old XBox (which is now sitting in my garage gathering mold) and loved it.ĬG: When did development begin? How many people are on the development team? What’s your relationship with the XBMC guys?Įlan: The XBMC code was first downloaded to attempt to build it on the Mac in December 2007. It came out of the desire to get the XBMC code running on a more powerful machine that could handle higher resolution media, and the perfect platform seemed to be the Mac (especially with the Mini’s awesome form factor). You sit on the couch, drink beer, and view your videos, photos, and play music. Hopefully it’s illuminating.ĬrunchGear: What is Plex? How would you describe it to a total computer novice? Did you ever use XBMC/XBMP for the Xbox1?Įlan Feingold: Plex is a media center, which is to say it’s a program which gives you a “ten foot interface” for your media. With that, here’s my conversation with Elan. (You may even want to go further back and give credit to the developers of mplayer and FFmpeg, the two core, open source “engines” that powered Xbox Media Player from Day One.) Let’s give credit where credit is due, is all. In other words, every time you praise Boxee (or Plex, or any other XBMC-derived media center), keep in mind how it all started: a hobbyist project designed to play and organize videos, music, and photos on hacked Xboxes. As the project matured-and the project was in no way endorsed or supposed by Microsoft-it became XBMC, of which Plex (and Boxee and MediaPortal and Voddler, to name a few forks) is based upon. Xbox Media Player was first released in 2002, and was far and away the most feature-rich media center of its time. Plex is a media center that’s based on XBMC, which began its life as Xbox Media Player, a media center that ran on hacked Microsoft Xboxes.

#BOXEE BOX HACKED MAC OS#

Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. Plex’s main menu, shown with the optional Aeon skinĪs far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat.

Boxee box hacked