I know boxee is obsolete and every says to root the box, but it works very well and I wouldn't want to mess up and lose netflix and vudu. I just wanted to add more streaming content if possible. Since all of the sites I google are from 2011, I thought this could be a place for others to share what they have working with an unmolested boxee box. Boxee has grown up. It was just a few short years ago that the NYC startup was simply hawking beta copies of its innovative media center software. Then came the D-Link-made Boxee Box, which sold. It says it works on windows 7 I upgraded my os went to download there is a mass amount of glitches and error's i wouldnt buy there hardware the new boxee box just for the fact they cant even keep.
Hey everyone.
Previous post for context: https://www.reddit.com/r/boxee/comments/c08y0e/dont_throw_your_boxee_boxes_away_just_yet/
Several people have been working on cloning the boxee.tv servers since they were taken down, in an effort to restore functionality to everyone's Boxee Boxes. Happy to say that as of today there are multiple implementations out there, and that my public hosted version of this is online and available to use.
Quick rundown:
- /u/cigamit has had a working implementation of this for years. He was kind enough to share his code, which enabled me to build out my simple version of a cloned server. His project is aiming to be a full featured boxee.tv replacement. This project isn't public yet, and i'm not sure if theres any plans to host a public server, but i'm sure when the codebase is in a better state, he'll share that work with us. Thanks!
- /u/st4rl has been working on an implementation of the cloned server and also a DNS server in one codebase. That code is live at https://gitlab.com/HazWard/boxee-server . I'm not 100% sure whether the project is tested and working, if they're around they can speak to it. But looks promising.
- My personal implementation is only meant to get the Boxee box in a working state again. It fixes the 'no internet connection' errors, gets login working (for any username and password) and gets the Netflix app loading again. I'll open source my code soon, but for now the server is live and able to be used by the public. Quick warning that i'm not considering this a 'production' server yet, as i'm sure i'll be tweaking things. And it's sitting on a very small instance type on AWS, so unsure what kind of traffic it can handle just yet. I'll know more as I get logging and metrics in.
The biggest barrier to using my public server is that you'll need to be running your own DNS server. I may spin up a quick DNS server for people to use, but I understand there's a lot of trust involved in using someone else's DNS server, so you may want to run your own. Personally, i'm running a raspberry-PI on my local network with https://pi-hole.net/ installed. Pi hole also enables you to run custom DNS entries by modifying the local hosts file on the server.
EDIT: I now have a public DNS server running at 18.211.111.89 that will route to my Boxee server.
Once you have your own DNS server, you'll need to set these custom host entries. Most likely this will involve modifying your /etc/hosts file on your DNS server:
Boxee Box Hacks
