From the start, Boxee was a cross-platform software only product, but as of about 18 months ago they have been working on a hardware product called the Boxee Box, which as you can imagine, is a standalone device running an embedded version of Boxee.

Boxee originally stated that they would always continue to support and maintain the PC/MAC/Linux version of its software, but after months and months of stagnation, when Boxee finally finally released the 1.5 update (bringing the desktop version in-line with the Boxee Box version), they also dropped the bombshell that they will no longer continue to support the software version or release any more updates.

This has come as a suprise to the tens of thousands of users who have been using the software version and supporting the developers by reporting bugs and issues and as you can imagine the Boxee forums are full of ranting posts and users spewing forth various tirades against Boxee.

I have taken the more pragmatic approach and simply jumped ship to an alternative, and to be honest its actually much much better.

That alternative is Plex. Plex is another XBMC fork so is familiar enough to those of us who have used XBMC and Boxee. The reason I’d not considered it until fairly recently was the fact that it didnt fully support Windows, that sounds a little odd, but keep reading on…
The main differences Plex has over XBMC and Boxee is its client-server architecture. The server components is called the Media Server and has run on Mac Linux and Windows for sometime now. This component of Plex is responsible for the back-end functionality, including, indexing, sorting and cataloguing your media and handling transcoding. It runs as a service and is managed via a simple to use web interface. The client part of the system, the Media Centre is the bit you see, its the part that delivers the video and audio to your TV and until recently this was only available for Mac. This all changed a couple of months ago with the release of their beta version for Windows, 9.2, codenamed Laika. Although still in beta, i’ve had no major issues with the Windows client at all, and would happily recommend it to anyone. Its worth mentioning that if you want a single device solution, both components can be installed on a single machine and this is in fact the way I run it at the moment on my main HTPC. The benefit of the client server architecture means that you can also have additional clients connecting back to your Media Server with an identical  interface, not just visually, but also in regards to how your media is organized, and watched status of TV Shows and movies.

As well as clients for Mac Windows and Linux, there are also clients for Android and iOS, with the Media Server providing transcoding of media to your iDevices on the fly. I cant speak for the iOS client, but the Android client is sleek, responsive and easy to use.

I’ve been using Boxee for some years and in some ways it is a wrench to move to something different, but ultimately it has definitely been worth it.