I don’t have a giant HDTV, my computer isn’t attached to the TV, and I don’t have an AppleTV either, so why would I want to try out media centre softwares? one simple answer – my librarian tendency of organizing things! My current way of organizing media is once I acquired an episode of the TV Show, I re-encode it to an iTunes/Front Row accepted format, then copy and paste episode info, summary, and artwork from wikipedia into iTunes.  A really long process just because I am anal about the metadata of the media files I got! So when one of the media center software that was causing all the headlines lately (Boxee of course!), one feature it has – the ability to get the show/movie info automatically from the net – got me thinking! This type of software could save me all the time from looking up the info and then copy and paste! Not to mention media center softwares has wide support of almost any format you can think of, then would also save me from the process of re-encoding! With all these benefits, I am sold!

The first software I tried was obviously Boxee since its name is all over the headlines lately because of its fight to keep Hulu support.  I install and tried it for two days, not completely satisfied.  Then I tried Plex and the result was a lot better!  So I am doing a little comparison for these two softwares here.  There’s one thing I need to state first though – Unlike many people who uses these softwares, I don’t particularly cared about online streaming support, my main purpose is to organize my media.  Therefore, I will not mention much about their online streaming offers.

Now a little background: Both Boxee and Plex are spinoff of the XBMC project originated from the first Xbox, (despite the unfortunate name and origin, Microsoft has nothing to do with the project what so ever.)  XBMC has since ported to Mac, and Boxee and Plex developed using XBMC as their starting point.  Both Boxee and Plex are free, but Boxee is cross-platform and has support for Mac, Linux, AppleTV (hacked), and (private invite Alpha) for Windows.  While Plex is Mac only (not even AppleTV).  Both has third-party plugin system that supports online streaming contents from Hulu, Joost, Youtube, etc.  Both has Last.fm support and uses the so-called “scrapper” process to get the title and info of your media automatically.  The different between the two is the implementation.

Boxee focus on social networking feature, you can make friends with other Boxee users, follow their activity and see exactly what they was watching.  You can recommend and rate the content for others to see.  Activity feed can be export to other social networking services.  Social networking is front and center for Boxee because the first thing you see on your home screen is what your friend watched.  Plex has a more traditional approach that it is media first and be elegant about it too.  (There’s no competition on which software has a prettier interface, Plex wins fair and square! not to mention it’s skinnable too! when you applies the even more awesome Aeon skin, words can’t describe how good looking it is!)

Because of being Mac only, Plex has unique features such as iTunes/iPhoto/Aperture integration.  Where Boxee can’t read any metadata from iTunes, so all your hard work from before was for nothing!  Both Boxee and Ples scrapped the information of your media from online sources – so it might not be entirely accurate, just like any automatic process.  I found it that Boxee’s process made a whole lot of mistakes while Plex’s result is a lot more satisfying. Plex is also more flexible because it uses more than one online source, and you can set it individually to fit your need.  In Boxee, if it get the info of your media wrong, the ways to correct it is limited.  I still haven’t find a way to change the artwork, not to mention whatever else you try to correct, it doesn’t stick! Boxee is also slow to recognize your media.  I spent two days and it still hasn’t gone through all of my media yet, while Plex is all set in a few hours (in large part due to the iTunes integration, where Boxee need to recognize everything from scratch!).

To be fair Boxee has a better support in terms of media playback, it has no problem playing rmvb files, while Plex can’t.  Boxee also has an awesome implementation in terms of subtitles, it just work compared to Plex’s subtitle support, which hasn’t work at all for me (although in the forum, everyone has the opposite, they can’t get Plex to turn off subtitles!)  Boxee is also easier to use because there’s not much setup, while Plex has quite a lot of things for you to set in order for it to work. (Plex offer 7+ vastly different arrangement views, while Boxee has 4 that aren’t dramatically different.) Plex can display my Chinese titles while Boxee still can’t. And last but not least – stability – I know both softwares are still in Alpha (which mean not even Beta!), but I can’t even exit Boxee properly! I have to force quit it every time! Of course unless it crash first, which happens quite often as well! Plex is much more stable and polish even when it has much less money to develop.  Plex is also catchup fast in terms of features – Boxee has online content plugins support first, but Plex has it soon after (and Hulu still works even if it stop working on Boxee).

My choice is pretty obvious even if Plex still has things that I wish it could do better (subtitles, rmvb support, social networking, etc), but at the end of the day, the one that doesn’t crash and is done scanning my hard drive for media wins.  Not to mention, a prettier interface does count in my book~

Update: added videos of Plex in action.

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Tagged: Boxee · Mac · Plex · softwares