Apple Tv + Boxee = Media Centre Solution

I have been looking at a media centre for a long time and when we purchased a 40" LCD Television recently I bought and AppleTV. I must say I liked the AppleTv interface as it was easy to use but, I had to convert every movie I wanted to watch with Handbrake which takes a couple of hours for a 720P movie.

So I installed Boxee on the AppleTV. Boxee was the best choice because it does not interfere with the normal AppleTv functionality, It just adds a laucher to the apple tv interface.

It took me a couple of hours to get everything working fine, These are the steps I used. So I plugged in my portable USB Harddrive and I added it to Boxee. Boxee indexed nearly all of my movies within 5 minutes and I was able to watch movies in every format without a problem.

The biggest reason to install Boxee for me was the ability to play .mkv files which all of my 720P movies are. Boxee has a great interface too!

The Boxee home screen.

So now I can:

• Play all my movies and Tv shows on my AppleTv
• Copy movies to the AppleTv wireless using SSH
• Access all my photos from Iphoto using the normal AppleTv interface

I would like to thank all the people involved in the Boxee project for creating such a great solution in the Alpha stage of their software.