Netflix on Boxee, but no AppleTV support (yet)


Boxee, the excellent, multi-platform, FOSS social media frontend has received a major upgrade: it now supports Netflix and all its functions — queue, watch instantly, and so on. In addition to that and all the regular bugfixes, they’ve updated the look and feel of some of the major media sites: Hulu is now a little more native-looking, Youtube supports “higher quality video playback” (whether it was a Boxee or Youtube limitation before is not clear), and also updates integration with Apple movie trailers, Flickr, MTV Music, and a host of other sites. Not bad at all! If I had a TV, I’d definitely be using Boxee or a Popcorn Hour.

Unfortunately, there’s a cloud to this silver lining: Netflix won’t work on your AppleTV, although they’re still working on making it happen. Apparently the little white box’s processor is just too frail to handle it. Neither is Netflix available for the Ubuntu version of Boxee: Netflix has planned a Linux-compatible version soon, however. A pre-release Windows version was also released today, but only to a small group for early testing. That pretty much leaves OS X users as the lords of the Boxee manor for the moment, so if you’re interested head over here to upgrade or register.