Boxee rolled out a number of software enhancements on Tuesday, complete with a version for the iPad, and a way to send videos from a PC to a Boxee-enabled display via the new Boxee Media Manager.
Boxee also updated its firmware on the Boxee Box to version 1.2, stomping bugs, adding OS X Lion and HTML5 support, and tweaking the app layout.
The idea, Boxee explained in a blog post, was to allow users to bookmark a piece of content on a PC at work, begin playing it on the train via an iPad 3G on the evening commute, and then finish it up at home via the Boxee box.
The Boxee app for iPad might seem a bit redundant, since most of the media that it assembles will be found on the Web. The app itself doesn't seem to curate videos from Netflix, Vudu, or any of the other services that the Boxee Box uses. Instead, it collects videos that friends can send you on Twitter or Facebook, or featured video that is curated by the Boxee staff.
The iPad app also allows users to "bookmark" a video using the bookmarklet video inside his or her browser; each time a user wants to save the video for later, he or she can click the bookmarklet in the toolbar and mark the video for later playback.
The iPad app also works with the new Boxee Media Manager, which indexes all the video that a user has stored on a PC or Mac, and then automatically converts it on the fly to the most appropriate bitrate. Users can also take a video that he or she is playing on a private iPad and send it to the Boxee box, to be displayed on the TV. In other words, it's a video-centric version of SnapStick, a service that debuted at CES 2011 and hasn't been heard from since.
Boxee also said that it will roll out version 1.2 of its firmware, which includes: