It’s a Mini Adventure – Plex vs Boxee
Although, as mentioned previously, neither Boxee nor Plex fulfill the requirements to be my main media centre front-end, they’re both extremely feature-rich when compared to Front Row for video playback. Although, with Perian installed, Front Row can play pretty much any video codec you can throw at it, iTunes will still only load certain file formats and the Movies / TV Shows menu items in Front Row are tied to your iTunes Library. There is a ‘Movies Folder’ option which allows you to browse said folder, but file-based navigation is something I was trying to get away from. When you consider their other advantages, such as access to BBC iPlayer, it’s obvious that Plex and Boxee are worth a look.
Both based on the Open Source XBox Media Centre (XBMC) project, they’re quite similar apps with slightly different approaches. They both play a variety of file formats and have an open-source plugin architecture that allows the functionality to be extended to grab internet content. Boxee describes itself as a ’social’ media centre, and allows you to make friends with other Boxee users à la any social network you care to mention. Plex’s focus is more on presentation, with a number of different available skins and library functionality which adds metadata to your movies and music (using the metadata stored in your iTunes Library).
I played with both of them for a while before settling on Plex as my preferred option. It’s slightly fiddlier setting up your media libraries than Boxee’s ‘look for media and tag it’ approach, but on the occasions that Boxee made a mistake in looking up information on a movie it was far harder to fix it than in Plex. Boxee’s other strength – the social angle – didn’t interest me at all and I found Boxee to crash a lot more often (in fairness, it is only in alpha, whereas Plex is beta). On the other hand, Plex has gorgeous, modifiable skins and, once the metadata is loaded, the Libraries are intuitive and self-updating. There is also an active project to integrate EyeTV into Plex, and I’m not aware of anything similar for Boxee (in fact, on one forum thread I found, some Boxee users were openly hostile to this idea, suggesting it went against the ‘cut the cable’ ethos of Boxee). Third-party plugins seem to be as widely supported on both apps, with Plex slightly having the edge at the moment for UK-based users due to its 4OD plugin, and thanks to a Plex Front Row plugin it fits easily into the current setup.
Of course, the beauty of all of this sitting on an actual computer rather than a closed box is that should Boxee’s functionality overtake Plex I can easily just switch to using that one instead. In the more likely event that Plex comes out of beta as a genuine replacement for Front Row, then it’s a simple job to reconfigure the system as required.
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