Boxee‘s media centre application can be run on a Mac, Linux or Windows system, but while those are good if you’re happy to run a computer in your lounge, it’s not ideal for most people, who want a small and crucially quiet box. We’ve seen it make Apple TV much more useful before now, but happily, Boxee has announced it has done a deal with a hardware company to produce a Boxee-branded media player.
Boxee is based on a branch of the now ancient Xbox Media Center, which still remains a favourite of people using PCs to watch their home media on their TVs. XBMC is an incredibly powerful system, and one of the best platform-independent media centres we’ve ever seen. This makes the idea of having a dedicated hardware platform for Boxee and XBMC enough to get our geek hearts racing.
Details of which company is producing the hardware aren’t available yet, but Boxee will unveil the full details on 7 December in New York. Boxee was also exhibiting last year at CES, so we kind of hope its hardware will be available for a sticky-fingers-on at this year’s event.