League of Ireland TV - 1.0 - "Videos from loi.ie"
Movies.ie - 1.0 - "Interviews from movies.ie"
Irish Music Television - 1.0 - "Videos from irishmusictelevision.com"
Balcony TV - 1.0 - "Daily videos from balconytv.com"
RTE Radio Podcasts - 1.0 - "Listen to radio shows from RTE"
Party Political Broadcast - 1.0 - "Irish Political Party Videos"
Sky News Live - 1.0 - "Watch Sky News Live"
Universal Sports - 1.0 - "Videos from universalsports.com"
Zozzy TV - 1.0 - "Videos from zozzytv.com"
Silicon Republic - 1.0 - (NOT CURRENTLY WORKING)

All of these apps pull video or audio from third party websites. From time to time these websites change, which may cause the apps to stop working correctly. I have no control over any of these websites but will endeavor to keep the apps up to date and working.

I have also developed an RTE Player App. This app is not 100% working so it is in my development repository which must be added separately. The development repository is at http://dir.nexthop.ie/testing

The RTE Player App currently only works on the Alpha release of Boxee.

Also unveiled was the new Boxee Box by D-Link. Specs for the box were sketchy except to say that it will include HDMI, WiFi, Optical Audio, Ethernet, RC Audio, 2 USB, SD Cart Slot, RF Remote. We have been promised a live demo of the box at CES in January. The Boxee Box is due to go on sale Q2 2010.

Videos from the event are available on livestream. There are screenshots of the beta on the Boxee Blog and Boxee.tv has got a revamp which includes pics of the Boxee Box.

Setting up your own repository is pretty straightforward. You will need to have a web hosting package of some kind to host your repository and all your applications, you may want to register a domain (or use one you already own).

The first thing to decide is the url that you will use for your repository. Most Boxee developers seem to prefer to set up a sub-domain for their repository, usually dir.yourdomain.com (e.g. dir.nexthop.ie is the url to my repository) Using a sub-domain is not a requirement. You could just as easily host your repository at www.yourdomain.com/boxee/myrepo/. Keep in mind however that not all Boxee users will have a keyboard hooked up to their media centre so short urls are preferred.

Once you have decided on where to host your repository you need to build it. The structure is quite simple. You need three files in the repository root directory. repository.xml, index.xml and index.php.

repository.xml should look something like this:
<repository>
<id>com.yourdomain</id>
<url>http://dir.yourdomain.com</url>
<name>Repository Name</name>
<thumb>http://dir.nexthop.ie/nexthop_logo.png</thumb>
<description>A short description</description>
</repository>


index.xml should look like this:
<apps>
<app>
<id>com.yourdomain.TourismIreland</id>
<name>Tourism Ireland</name>
<version>1.0</version>
<description>Watch Videos from Tourism Ireland</description>
<thumb>http://dir.nexthop.ie/apps/tourismireland/ti.png</thumb>
<repository>http://dir.yourdomain.com</repository>
<media>video</media>
<copyright>dkane</copyright>
<email>info@yourdomain.com</email>
<type>url</type>
<platform>all</platform>
<minversion>0.9.5</minversion>
<url>rss://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/TourismIreland/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss</url>
</app>
</apps>


index.php is very similar to index.xml, it should look like so:
<?php
$fp = fopen($_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"], "r");
$etag = md5(serialize(fstat($fp)));
fclose($fp);
header('Etag: '.$etag);
header ("content-type: application/xml");
?>
<apps>
<app>
<id>com.yourdomain.TourismIreland</id>
<name>Tourism Ireland</name>
<version>1.0</version>
<description>Watch Videos from Tourism Ireland</description>
<thumb>http://dir.nexthop.ie/apps/tourismireland/ti.png</thumb>
<repository>http://dir.yourdomain.com</repository>
<media>video</media>
<copyright>dkane</copyright>
<email>info@yourdomain.com</email>
<type>url</type>
<platform>all</platform>
<minversion>0.9.5</minversion>
<url>rss://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/TourismIreland/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss</url>
</app>
</apps>

Note that the <id> tag has changed to include the repository id:
<id>com.yourdomain.TourismIreland</id>
Also make sure that there is a blank line at the end of each of these files, just after the last closing tag. Failing to include this blank line may cause your repository to not behave correctly.

You also need a directory under the root called download. This directory will store zipped copies of all your applications. In the download directory there should be a zipped archive for each app. The zipped file should be named com.yourdomain.TourismIreland-1.0.zip where com.yourdomain is the id of your repository, TourismIreland is the name of the app and 1.0 is the version number as in the descriptor.xml and index.xml files.

Inside the zipped file there should be one directory named com.yourdomain.TourismIreland, notice the version number is not part of this directory name.
And within this directory should be the discriptor.xml file as described in my previous post building your first rss app for boxee. Note that the value of <id> in the descriptor is not the same as <id> in index.xml and index.php.
In the index files the <id> tag should read:
<id>com.yourdomain.TourismIreland</id>
In the descriptor this should read:
<id>TourismIreland</id>

When you create a new application you will need to add the zipped archive for the app to the download directory and add a new  <app> section to both index.php and index.xml.

When you have created your repository you can try it out by adding it to your Boxee setup as I described in this post.
Once you are happy that all is working correctly and you have added your first few apps to the repository you may submit it to fuzzthed.com's list of Boxee repositories here.

A repository is basically a directory of third-party applications. Once a repository has been added installing applications takes just one click. Also when the developer adds new applications to their repository they will automatically be available through the App Box.

Fuzz the Destroyer maintains a really nice list of available repositories on his site fuzzthed.com.

To add a repository:
Log into Boxee, navigate to App Box > Repositories > Add Repository and enter the URL of the repository you want to add (for example http://dir.nexthop.ie)

The first step is to find the directory where Boxee stores files for the different Apps. This varies depending on your operating system.
on OS X/AppleTV
~/Library/Application Support/BOXEE/userdata/apps
on Linux
~/.boxee/userdata/apps
on Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\BOXEE\userdata\apps
on Windows Vista/7
C:\Users\[username]\appdata\Roaming\BOXEE\userdata\apps

In this directory you will see a folder for each application that you have installed in Boxee.
For this app I am going to use the TourismIreland Youtube channel as my source. The link to the RSS feed for this channel is:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/TourismIreland/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss
In the apps directory that you have open create a new folder called TourismIreland.
Within this folder create a file called descriptor.xml with the following content:

<app>
<id>TourismIreland</id>
<name>Tourism Ireland</name>
<version>1.0</version>
<description>Watch Videos from Tourism Ireland</description>
<thumb>http://dir.nexthop.ie/apps/tourismireland/ti.png</thumb>
<repository>http://dir.nexthop.ie</repository>
<media>video</media>
<copyright>dkane</copyright>
<email>info@nexthop.ie</email>
<type>url</type>
<platform>all</platform>
<minversion>0.9.5</minversion>
<url>rss://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/TourismIreland/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss</url>
</app>


All that is left to do is add the application to  Boxee.
To do this launch Boxee, go to Settings > Media Sources >Manually Add Source
In the Source Name field type  TourismIreland
In Source Location type app://TourismIreland
and select Video from Source Type
Click Add.
Your new application should now be available under Applications > Video

I will start with the easier ways and work up through building more and more complex Boxee Apps one step at a time. The first couple of examples that I will demonstrate make the content available to you when you open Boxee. As you come up with ideas for Boxee Apps you most likely will want to start sharing your apps with others. To do this you need to set up a repository. I will go into this in a later post, for now lets look at the first way you can pull an RSS feed into Boxee.

In this example I am going to use an RSS feed for one of my favorite Youtube channels, that of Movies.ie. Youtube channels work really well with Boxee because each channel has its own RSS feed.

The URL for the Movies.ie feed is:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/moviesireland/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss

To change this to your favorite Youtube channel all you need to do is remove "moviesireland" from the URL and replace it with the username of your favorite channel.

Boxee has a nice feature called Feeds available through its website. To add this channel to your mediacentre all you need to do is log into boxee.tv, go to Feeds and click Add New.

Enter the URL to your Youtube channel, select Video from Feed Type and press Add Feed.
If you entered the ULR correctly the feed will now show up under My Feeds.

To view the feed in Boxee login and navigate to Applications > Video. Click on Video Feeds.

And then on the name of your feed.

You will see a list of the videos from your Youtube channel. As the creator of the channel uploads new videos the RSS feed will be updated and the latest videos will be available for you to watch through Boxee.

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