presents
FLOSS Media Centers State of the Art
Comparison Chart
Giovani Spagnolo, coordinator
Program Director – Telematics Freedom Foundation
Revision 1.1
Last Update: September 20, 2008.
Introduction
This paper presents a Comparison Chart reflecting the State of the Art for the most prominent Media Center
(MC) projects in the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community at the time of this writing.
This document is not aimed to “pick a winner”, nor to promote any of the compared MCs. It also shouldn't
be considered the “ultimate truth” about the Media Centers showcased here. Please do your own research
before picking your choice.
The goal here is simply to share knowledge about the current State of the Art done by the community on
FLOSS MC projects, and to provide project leaders and developers with enough feedback on which features
to focus on next in opposition to other projects, in an effort to discover new synergies with other existing
FLOSS projects.
Before starting a public survey, we divided projects into two main categories: FLOSS Media Center Projects
(with or without PVR features) and FLOSS All-in-one solutions (custom GNU/Linux Media Center
distributions). We'll be focusing and detailing the first category of Media Centers here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Telematics Freedom Foundation – FLOSS Media Centers State of the Art - Comparison Chart – Page 2
Presenting: Boxee
Boxee is a startup company. It is also a “Social Media
Center” that enables users to view, rate and recommend
content to their friends through many social networking
features. Boxee's CEO, Avner Ronen, announced the first
alpha release on June 16, 2008. The alpha phase is
invite-only but anyone can apply for an invitation on
Boxee's website. Boxee is a FLOSS Media Center based on
XBMC and currently runs on Mac and Linux platforms,
with a Windows version under development.
Presenting: CenterStage+Plex
The CenterStag