Hacking a Boxee Box

I recently purchased an Amazon Fire TV Stick and love that it allows the ability to sideload applications like Kodi (I still hate that name, long live XBMC!) for media streaming. I mainly use Samba/SMB shares on my network for my media, with most of my content living on an old WDTV Live Hub. The WDTV Hub works great and is still pretty stable after all of these years (except for a few built-in apps like YouTube, I wish they kept going with updates), and the Fire TV will gladly chug away, playing any video over the network. However, I had the need to have my media stream to a third television and I didn’t want to uproot an existing device and carry it from room to room.



So I needed a third device. I already have a second generation Roku kicking around, but it doesn’t appear to be able to run anything other than the stock software at this time. I also considered a Raspberry Pi and wifi dongle, but this puts the price up to around $50 (which is more than the Fire TV Stick. I do want something cheap). I looked for a less expensive option with older media streamers and found a lot of information about the Boxee Box appliance put out by D-Link in 2008, discontinued in 2011. I first encountered this box in around 2012 when I was tasked to do some reverse engineering on it, but that’s another story. In the time since, a Google TV hacking team figured out they could do simple shell command injection when setting the Box’s host name, which eventually evolved into a group developing Boxee+Hacks, a replacement operating system. Since Boxee+Hacks, other developers have been working on a port of Kodi which you can install onto the Boxee to give you more options and better compatibility over the operating system’s built in features.

https://famicoman.com/2016/03/07/rehacking-a-boxee-box/