• File Identification Progress (shows how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize within the media collection)
• Manual Movie & TV Show identification (you can now tell Boxee what’s in your collection and/or change incorrectly labelled files)
• Facebook & Twitter in your Boxee feed (recommendations from friends on Facebook & Twitter can now be seen within Boxee)
• New & Improved RSS Management (a brand new way to manage, discover and play RSS feeds in Boxee)
• hundreds of bugs fixes.

Find the latest version of Boxee here.

Source: Boxee

The new additions – global menu – makes it easy to access helpful resources (Logout, Settings, Queue, Feed, History), the main menu (Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps, Files) and shortcuts to our favorite apps, TV shows or movies.

The Boxee sidebar has been extended to Music, Photos, and Apps.

Boxee overhauled Movies and TV shows to include both internet and local content. If you know what it is you want to watch, there is no need to go through an App now.

The Beta organizes TV shows by season and episode, and let’s you filter by whether freely available or not.

Along with the Beta Bexee introduced three new Content Partners – Clicker (a TV Guide to the Web), The Escapist (a video game review site), and Suicide Girls (sexy nude photos & videos of tattooed girls).

Boxee team have also increased what people can do with Boxee Apps.  Developers can now use OAuth to give Boxee access to private resources meaning users can easily access their accounts across the web.

We can now not only watch video, but also start browsing websites that don’t already have a Boxee App or RSS feed using a Boxee browser.

The Beta also brings official support for Snow Leopard and Ubuntu Karmic.

The graphical back-end has been switched from OpenGL to DirectX to take advantage of Direct X Video Acceleration.  Boxee has also worked closely with NVidia on their ION platform to offload video processing with DXVA and Flash 10.1.

Boxee Bata will be open up to the public at CES 2010, Jan 7th.

Boxee will play any non-DRM content, and let users share information with each other and their existing social networks about what they’re watching or listening to. It will also aggregate all your entertainment (video, music, images) into one place and add in any RSS/XML/MMS feed (with mainstream content from sites like Hulu & ABC coming soon).

You can read more about Boxee in this article, or watch the video below.

The installation is very simple, thanks to an installer which formats a USB drive and sets it up to do the installation for you once plugged into your Apple TV.

If you would like to get an invite to the Boxee alpha, simply follow this link http://www.boxee.tv/atvhacks. You can then grab the USB-drive installer software from here.

This version is comes with ssh, bin tools, and two plugins (XBMC for Mac and Boxee for Mac). That’s right, two full blown OSX applications with their own AppleTV plugin to launch and get updates.

Currently, it is only available to run on OS X, but Linux and Windows versions should be following within the week.

Download it http://atvusb-creator.googlecode.com.

It allows you to play video content stored on the AppleTV, but not inside the iTunes media file structure. This is a great first step towards integrating additional software features right into the Apple TV:

A couple plugins we would like to see are:

- A quit menu. We would like to be able access the other features that are being enabled for the Apple TV (alternative media players, 3rd party applications etc.) whilst keeping quick and easy access to the standard Apple TV GUI.

- A games menu. This would be a nice addition for people with kids, simple games that can be played using the remote.

- An RSS reader. Quickly and easily read news from your favourite websites on your TV, whilst eating cereal.

- A Record menu! This one would be a biggie, built right into the Apple TV, the option to record programs using a schedule.

What would you like from a plugin built right into the Apple TV?

Update: You can now download it here.

Joost, though still in beta, is the brainchild of the same people behind the Kazaa and Skype. It will offer Cable TV shows straight to your computer, via the internet by way of (legal) peer to peer filesharing. Obviously, this could be a brilliant function to have on your Apple TV!

We, however, remain skeptical for now; they provide one fuzzy image and a ‘promise’ it is real, as well as the claim that they guessed the password.

Their main gripe isn’t with the hardware, but with the cost of content from iTunes:

I think Apple TV is a fantastic product—but I won’t be buying one until I can watch movies with it for less than the price of going to see one in the theaters.

It’s worth pointing out that there are alternatives to buying your Apple TV content on iTunes; and as time progresses we imagine there will be more and more sources for Apple TV content. We hope to keep track of these sources via our content category.