Boxee's Mac Media Player Will See It's Last Update - New Focus on Boxee Box and iPads

The Boxee project is one that has come a long way from when it first started as a fork of the Xbox Media Center, bringing easy video playback and a couch-to-screen UI to the Mac, then later to Windows and Ubuntu, and now to the company’s dedicated Boxee Box hardware (which is said to support live broadcast TV soon). There’s a solid ecosystem of app developers making themselves at home with Boxee as of right now too.


The company is said to be releasing version 1.5 of its desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu this week, which will feature many improvements that will also be appearing in the Boxee Box firmware early next year. There is one caveat though – this update will be the final release of Boxee’s desktop build and future development efforts will solely be focused on the Boxee Box hardware and on tablets like the iPad. Version 1.5 will be available for download on Boxee’s site through the end of January 2012, which gives the Boxee team a bit of time to take down the “roll your own” section on the Boxee site.

For those of you who are Mac HTPC devotees, you might be starting to look for an alternative to Boxee. As of right now, the Plex project is also partially built atop XBMC along with a proprietary server component and furthermore, there’s even a Plex iOS app available that allows you to watch stuff on the iPad. The parent XBMC app is still going strong and a beta build of version 11.0 Eden came out just last week as well. Both Plex and XBMC are also now supporting jailbroken Apple TVs for playback. Plex currently requires an Intel Mac running 10.6 or higher, while XBMC continues to support PowerPC Macs along with Intel models.

How do you feel about the news of the Boxee desktop software seeing its final update? Do you or did you plan on using Boxee to begin with or have you been using an alternative? Share any thoughts and opinions below!