Creating Your Own Boxee Repository
// May 25th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Developer Blog
The “open-ness” of the Boxee platform is what, I believe, will ultimately make it wildly successful. The ability for content creators to instantly distribute their creations to monitors and TV sets around the world is a game changer. Unfortunately, installing a Boxee app manually is a task only a developer (or hardcore tech geek) would feel comfortable with. Surely, for those who are using Boxee free from any keyboard (maybe with the awesome iPhone remote app?) manually installing an app is impossible.
Fortunately, Boxee has a killer little feature called the App Box. Within the App Box, users can add “Repositories,” essentially directories that house third-party applications. Once a repository is added, installing the apps from that repository is a one click process. Developers can add additional apps and they’ll show up automatically in a viewer’s App Box as soon as they are available. I love it!
What I don’t love, however, is the fact that the guys at Boxee have been lax over the past months in giving ANY documentation for creating repositories. It took me hours of reverse engineering (and packet sniffing) to get mine up and running. Instead of write out a long writeup of instructions, I’m just going to include a link to a demo repository I’ve created for those of you who are interested in doing one.
Simply unzip the file I’ve created into the root (or whatever directory) of your server, change the values, and you’re up and running. I’ve even included two blank apps (one “skin” type and one “rss” type) in the file structure.
Have fun and I’m happy to answer comments.
P.S. One thing to note. When you edit the index.xml, index.php, and repository.xml files, there must be a blank line at the end (carriage return). Otherwise Boxee will not read the files. This screwed me up for days. Keep it in mind.