Boxee is a free, mulitplatform, media centre designed for the livingroom TV. Boxee is a fork of XBMC. Boxee adds a social element to the media centre, allowing users to rate and recommend content to friends.

An alpha version of Boxee is available to download from Boxee.tv. The beta version is due to be unveiled at an event in New York on Dec 7th. Initially the beta version will only be available to attendees at the unveiling.

There are two main components to Boxee.

1) It organises and catalogs your local video, audio and photos.

Boxee scans your hard drive and network shares looking for video, audio and photos. It then builds a library of your media. It connects out to the IMDb and pulls down the correct name, synopsis and artwork for movies. Metadata is pulled down in a similar fashion for your TV shows and music collection.

2) It has a host of apps that connect to online media such as youtube, apple movie trailers, BBC iPlayer etc.

There is an ever growing collection of apps available for Boxee that provide a connection to online Media. These are broken down into Video, Music and Pictures. Some of these apps are made by Boxee but a lot are made by the community. Any developer can create their own repository which can be accessed from within the Boxee interface. A list of Boxee repositories is available on fuzzthed.com