I've been meaning to write this up for a while but have been very busy enjoying Boxee and the entertainment it offers! It has continued to gather momentum at great pace since the last time I wrote about Boxee, just over a month ago. An article about Boxee has appeared on the New York Times website, the Boxee Twitter account now has about 11,000 followers and thoughts have turned to the possibility of  selling ready-made dedicated Boxee boxes. This is very good going for a software product that is only in alpha, needs a fair degree of computer know-how to get it up and running and is not yet publicly available for Windows. It is worth installing though, the software has that magical quality of feeling like things should have always been done this way, and the act of recommending a video podcast episode to a friend is so easy and yet is such a powerful concept. Boxee makes the most sense connected to your TV rather than being on a laptop. Media centre PCs that are designed to go in your living room are a perfect choice too. When you have a PC connected to your TV it is a different idea from having a laptop, you don't need some of the things that come with standard Ubuntu like an office suite and ease of configuration for things like codecs becomes more important. Fortunately Mythbuntu exists, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for media centre PCs that removes most of the desktop software and adds in support for MythTV. It is also a really good choice for a Boxee installation.

Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.

The Open University here in the UK regularly coproduces educational programming in partnership with the BBC. Some of these programmes are for a wide audience such as Coast, and other programmes are for more specialist audiences such as The Story of Maths. To catch these programmes you don't have to necessarily stay in and make sure that you are sat on your sofa in front of the TV at a scheduled time, instead you can catch the repeats on BBC iPlayer (sorry - UK, IoM & Channel Islands only). My colleague Tony Hirst recently created a mash up to find the OU programmes from the last seven days posted to iPlayer using feeds from Twitter, iPlayer and a Yahoo Pipe, he then presented the results in a web page. When looking at his blog post on this it struck me that it would be really nice if this could be presented in a way more suitable for a media centre PC connected to a TV, so this would mean nice big fonts, an attractive interactive-TV type interface and ease of use from a remote control, and then I thought it would be even better to feed this into MythTV, integrating seven days of OU programming alongside the rest of your entertainment.