These days almost all my TV viewing has moved online. After much frustration I settled on Boxee as my home entertainment center of choice, running on a Mac Mini sitting on my shelf. It started quite rough but it’s been constantly improving and the new version is great. My favourite thing about Boxee is the iPlayer though. It puts almost all of my favourite TV content on Boxee. Almost all.
What’s been missing is 4oD, Channel 4’s IPTV service. Channel 4’s documentaries, in particular, are fantastic. Unfortunately when 4oD launched it was PC only. Last year they finally opened it up to Mac users but it was still limited to the browser, which is awkward to use from my sofa without a mouse. Awkward to the point of being unusable.
A few months ago, while waiting to be served at a pub in Soho, I overheard a man in a suit telling his colleague that Channel 4 were moving all their content over to YouTube. That sounded very exciting. Leaving aside the implications for the entertainment industry this meant that 4oD would have feeds.
Last week I happened across YouTube’s 4oD feeds and thought I’d try hacking a quick Boxee app together - mostly for my own benefit. Working with Boxee’s UI XML isn’t the easiest thing in the world but after a lot of reading, poking, twiddling and cursing I finally got something functioning. It’s very much alpha. Maybe even pre-alpha. But if you want to try it out here are the instructions:
- Launch Boxee.
- Go to “apps”.
- Down the left, right at the bottom under “extras”, is “repositories”.
- In there is an option to “add repository”.
- Hit that and enter “boxee.donotremove.co.uk”.
- That should get you “Mike’s Boxee repo” and in there is “4OD”.
- Hit that and go “add to my apps”.
- Start it.
The UI is limited, to say the least. 4oD channels are down the left; shows are down the right. Pressing right loads the show from the channel you have selected; left goes back to the channels. My biggest niggle at the moment is that loading channel content is a bit laggy. Let me know how it goes though! I’ll make improvements as I find the time and as I learn more about making Boxee apps. Or maybe Channel 4 have their own app in the works… We can hope!
