I’m quite happy with my small HTPC running Boxee on Ubuntu. The hardware is a Zotac Ion board with an Atom CPU and an Nvidia graphics card. Both software and hardware have their issues, but after enough hacking I’ve a setup that gets the job done wrt. watching movies off my file server. My main gripe has been the lack of on-demand movie services in Europe. Sure, I could probably setup VPN on my Linux box, use some provider to get an American IP address and register with Netflix and Hulu, but it just seemed like too much trouble.
Enter Headweb – very promising post on the Boxee blog. I immediately registered, found the app on Boxee, managed to login (it told me there was some problem, but it actually did log me in), found “the Green Hornet” under “My movies” and clicked on it… Nothing happened – it just kept hanging. The same with other movies. As far as I could see from the log, the Headweb app tries to use stuff that’s not in the API of Boxee Beta 0.9.22.13692 – probably it’s newer stuff, only available in the version on the Boxee box.
Well, after a few minutes of hacking the Headweb app it now appears to be working. At least I can select movies, get info about them and watch trailers. I haven’t watched any full movies yet, but I’ll try soon enough. The two files I modified are “HeadwebObjects.py” and “HeadwebObj.py”. Below you have my modified versions; try them out (backup your originals first of course) and have fun!
Download:
