Boxee, an open source media center with a focus on UI and social networking is now available on Apple TV!

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.

The atv-bootloader team have today launched atvusb-creator, which creates USB flash drive based installers that include patchstick, factory restore and various Linux distributions.

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.

XBMC, an open source, cross-platform media center is no installable on Apple TV. XBMC supports a very complete spectrum of of audio and video multimedia file formats and codecs right out-of-the-box.

With the built in features and third party plugins, this really is a flexible media center. You can find out more on how to install XBMC on your Apple TV at this thread on their website.

A USB installer is in the works, but is currently not quite ready. For now you have to do the installation manually.

If you ever wanted to prove your geek-cred to your friends what could be better than using your iPhone as a graphical remote for your car stereo.

Nels Johnson has done exactly that, and has posted the details for how to do it yourself at his site http://www.quickanddirty.tv/.

We’d point out that you should probably have someone else controlling the tunes, whilst you pay attention to the road!

Andrew Kippen of Boxee has just informed me that the long-awaited Ubuntu Linux version of Boxee will finally be made available for download today at boxee.tv

Like the OS X version of Boxee, the software will be released as an alpha version.  So please keep that in mind.

By the way, if you are working on porting Boxee to Apple TV, I would love to hear your progress on how the port is going.   Can’t wait to see it running on the Apple TV.

By now, you are probably having fun using your iPhone/iPod Touch to control and view media on your the Apple TV with the help of the Remote app. And what a neat app it is.

Now that Apple has shown us what could be done with the iPhone SDK and the new Apple TV 2.1 firmware, I am very excited at the possibilities of other apps to follow (either from Apple or 3rd party).

I wrote a post at AppleTVSource a few days back about what this can lead to: two-way control, video support and maybe even screen sharing.

Apple may have published an extensive documentation on the iPhone SDK but none on how to control the Apple TV. But then again that’s why we hack.

Currently, I am trying to figure out how the iPhone-Apple TV communication works. I haven’t had much time to look into this though. I suspect that the Apple TV exposes a set of web services to be consumed by the client. These web services are used to control and retrieve the media data.

I sent an email to the iPhone SDK support team at Apple but I doubt if I will get anything back from them.

Has anybody looked into this? I would love to hear from you.