D-Link Boxee Box is a Linux based media player powered by Intel Atom CE4100 processor that became available in 2010, and features a dual sided RF remote / QWERTY keyboard that probably inspired many of the air mouse that are available today.
The box features many of the ports and connectors that are available on most Android STB today, namely an HDMI port, an optical S/PDIF) out, a stereo analog audio out, Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi, two USB ports, and an SD card slot. Many people however got disappointed with the firmware at launch time, and even if subsequent firmware updates have improved the user experience, some people have considered it was worth the effort to port XBMC to the device.
Myles McNamara wrote the instructions to install XBMC on D-Link Boxee Box. I’ll summarize the steps below, and it appears to be relatively easy.
- Installing Boxee+Hacks to gain root access
The first thing you’ll have to do is to gain root access by following these steps:- Download install.zip (Boxee+Hacks) from http://boxeed.in/
- Format a USB flash drive or SD card to FAT32 using the label BOXEE (case sensitive)
- Copy the files from the zip files to the USB drive or SD card.
- Plug it into the device, and boot Boxee Box
- Go into ‘Settings’->’Network’->’Servers’ to enable ‘Windows File Sharing’
- Add ‘;sh /media/BOXEE/install.sh‘ to your ‘Host Name’. Make sure it looks like ‘boxeebox;sh /media/BOXEE/install.sh‘ after you’re done.
- Reboot the device to start the install process.
- Once it’s complete, you’ll have a device with root access.
- Installing XBMC on Boxee Box
There are two ways to install XBMC on D-Link media player: building XBMC from source using code and instructions available on https://github.com/quarnster/boxeebox-xbmc, or much simpler, download the latest version from devil-strike.com which as of today is xbmc13.alpha12.boxeebox2014.01.18.early_alpha2_92146e8.zip. You’ll notice this is an alpha version, and this XBMC port to Boxee Box is new, so although the system will run, you can’t expect everything to magically work out of the box.Once you’ve downloaded the zip file, extract the files to the root of a storage device (USB flash drive or SD card) making sure xbmc.bin is in the root folder, insert the storage device in Boxee Box, power the device, and it should automatically boot into XBMC. If you remove the storage device, it will just boot Boxee+Hacks you’ve installed previously.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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