After coming across details regarding Boxee and the extended number of sources that it can pull videos from, I just had to give it a test drive.
First of all, Boxee is a media player that is being developed for multiple platform use. It’s not restricted to videos and is able to stream music from Pandora as well as Last.fm.
One of the first things that I noticed upon registering for Boxee (which is free) was that it is currently only available for Mac and Ubuntu. A Windows version is in development, however, it’s not currently possible to get an install of the alpha/beta Windows builds.
To further disappoint me just a bit, I found that the installers for Ubuntu were for 32-bit machines only. fortunately there is that geeky thing you can do called “force-architecture” or “force-all”. 😛
After using my online best friend (Google) I was able to come across several guides for installing Boxee on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. Some of them were correct and some of them weren’t. Some of them were scattered and unorganized and…well…none of them were pathetically easy to follow.
That’s why you’re here. 😉
If you want to install Boxee on Ubuntu 32-bit, just follow the installation instructions provided after registering. If you’re installing in Ubuntu 64-bit (Jaunty Jackalope I might add) then please continue.
Installation
- Install “getlibs-all” by downloading it from here and double clicking to install or by copy/pasting the following terminal commands. (More details about getlibs here).
wget http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb - wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
- zcat Packages.gz | grep Filename
- Make sure that the bold part in the following command matches the file name from the above command (ignoring the jaunty and intrepid folder differences).
wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb - sudo dpkg -i –force-all boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
sudo dpkg -i –force-architecture boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
- The following command may take some time to complete, however, be patient and wait for getlibs to prompt you whether or not to install additional libraries to make Boxee work on your machine. Be sure to answer yes or y. 😉
getlibs /opt/boxee/Boxee - sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns
After being patient and completing these (honestly) few steps, you should be able to launch Boxee from the application menu and start enjoying some Internet videos!
For further reading or more detailed/technical instructions please see the source thread of this process.
Also, for the record, Netflix Watch Instantly does not work in Boxee for Ubuntu as far as I can tell (due to the lack of DRM support).
I hope I’ve been able to help in some way. Best of luck with Boxee!