Boxee is now my mediaplayer while at work

By On January 22, 2010 · 6 Comments

Boxee on the desktop

I’ve been playing with the beta version of Boxee and I’m more and more enjoying it. During work, its got the perfect interface for playing back tunes but I also discover I could also connect to my shares at home easily using Hamachi VPN. Simply pop in the ip address of your remote machine and thats it. Because Hamachi uses a 5.x.x.x address, Boxee connects and the locally running Hamachi takes over the connection. Not only that, because Hamachi’s central server is only used to connect the two points, all traffic is routed as directly as possible. Aka the lag time I’m getting is super low due to the 1meg upstream link at home and super fast connection at work. Fast enough to even play some of films if I really wanted to. I also suspect when away off site I can use my 3g/HSDPA connection to do the same with no changes to Hamachi or Boxee.

Boxee with Hamachi VPN

I know a lot of people don’t like Hamachi but to be fair I run it on almost every machine I own and enjoy how simple it makes VPN and tunneling. I’ve still had no luck with L2L: layer two but yet to try Wippen which I hear is the truly open version of Hamachi.

I could use XBMC to do the same but I actually prefer boxee’s interface for my laptop and xbmc’s for large displays. Also the social features in Boxee means if I quickly hear a tune I like or something, within a few clicks its shared and i’m back to work again. Now if only mix podcasts came with tracks…

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  • Lucas

    Mediaplyer while at work?

    Do you watch movies for a living? Maybe I should move back to the UK.

    -

    ‘Effing “F Connect” is not working for me, mate. Maybe it’s because it’s designed for IE? ;-)

  • Lucas

    Mediaplyer while at work?

    Do you watch movies for a living? Maybe I should move back to the UK.

    -

    'Effing “F Connect” is not working for me, mate. Maybe it's because it's designed for IE? ;-)

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  • http://www.lanbridger.com/ Michael Amundson

    Really cool! Boxee is quite an improvement over XBMC, I think, and only has room to improve. Amusingly enough, I’m one of the developers on a project similar to Hamachi, and we’ve been “eating our own dogfood” by doing basically what you describe, albeit using our software. If you care to give us a shot, we’d love to hear your feedback on what we can do to improve your media sharing experience (and your network tunneling experience in general).

    Best regards!

  • http://www.lanbridger.com/ Michael Amundson

    Really cool! Boxee is quite an improvement over XBMC, I think, and only has room to improve. Amusingly enough, I'm one of the developers on a project similar to Hamachi, and we've been “eating our own dogfood” by doing basically what you describe, albeit using our software. If you care to give us a shot, we'd love to hear your feedback on what we can do to improve your media sharing experience (and your network tunneling experience in general).

    Best regards!

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