XBMC has been around for some time, and has its roots (and namesake) from running on modded first generation XBoxes. XBMC is essentially the swiss-army knife of media center software — check out the list of supported A/V codecs and formats to get an idea. As an added bonus, it is also open source, licensed under the GPL. Boxee takes this software, which has been ported to run on commodity hardware, and adds social elements and web video streaming capabilities, and their own blend of unique features.

The typical rich media options of photos, music, videos are all there, along with the ability to consume media from a variety of sources. These may be local (local hard drive, USB removable devices), network shares, Internet audio streams and video services such as Youtube and Hulu, etc. Ah, sweet sweet, web 2.0 goodness. Boxee also has you create an account (it *is* a service, after all, not merely an app) that is used to store profile data. You can add friends, a la any other socially aware service, and see an activity stream of recently streamed music, videos, etc. Privacy settings are, of course, provided to configure the level of sharing.

I have a Mac Mini in my living room and installed the latest version of Boxee. One nice feature when running on recent Macs is Boxee fully supports the Apple Remote. In fact, Boxee replaces Front Row as the default action when invoking the OSD in OS X. I checked out the web video streaming, audio, and DVD playback features. Some observations:

• several crashes, but this is *alpha* software, so it’s understandable/forgivable
• Boxee automatically grabs local audio files and retrieves album artwork, arranging music by artist or album visually
• several of the links to show episodes on Hulu were no longer available for viewing
• the visualization for audio playback was stunning, and left me wondering why Front Row doesn’t provide at least some simple animation
• streaming web video playback was very stuttery (Hulu, in particular)
• torrent support (you can download torrents from within Boxee) and a link to Public [i.e. legal, public domain media] Torrents
• configuration options abound, from video resolution to remote control timing settings

Some may argue that these (and many more, no doubt) features have been available in Windows Media Center and other software for years, but for me personally the litmus test was a Mac (mini) driven media center experience. Boxee is the home media center app that Front Row should’ve been all along. I’ve been waiting for a quality home theater experience on the Mac, and while promising, CenterStage and other projects have (so far) failed to deliver. All the more reason Boxee’s arrival is met with open arms and much rejoicing, even if it is still alpha quality.

VirtualBox, Sun’s entry in the crowded virtual machine market, is an interesting addition to the company’s growing line of OSS products. VirtualBox supports a wide array of host OSes (the usual Windows, Linux, Mac OS X + OpenSolaris, being a Sun product), and guest OSes. One key characteristic is VirtualBox is completely open source, GPL-licensed in fact.

Naturally, other open source VM solutions exist, but in general they aren’t intended to be used as mainstream end-user applications that compete with existing commercial products such as VMWare and Parallels. It goes without saying that virtualization technology is becoming more and more commoditized, and open source solutions such as Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox only serve to increase this trend.

In my own experience, VMs have been a Godsend for cross platform software development. While having an array of 20 (physical) test machines with different platforms and configurations is nice, it’s not always financially practical. Thus, deploying server-based virtual machines for handling the tasks of automated builds and test suites across all supported platforms is essential. Desktop VMs are also useful for manual testing.

I downloaded the latest version 2.0.4 for OS X, and gave it a spin. The UI and installation procedure for new VMs are top notch. I installed the latest version of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex (8.10), as a guest OS. VirtualBox supports most of the features of the commercial VM apps. In my admittedly unscientific test, VirtualBox seemed much more responsive and usable than either VMWare Fusion or Parallels. There were a few bugs or missing features:

• no support for 64-bit guest OSes on Mac OS X
• the installation process for the guest OS completely froze Mac OS X the first time, and I had to do a hard reset (could have been because I was simultaneously running Parallels..)
• resizing the guest OS window is a bit slow and doesn’t preserve the window size, at least in my test with Ubuntu

Other than these few items, I was impressed with the capabilities of VirtualBox. I look forward to seeing new features and enhancements in updated revisions, and also to the promising future for open source virtualization.