So, if you’ve been watching the CES coverage at all, you probably will have seen some hands on with the D-Link Boxee box. It’s an off angle cube powered by Tegra 2 and dishes out all the Boxee goodness straight to your TV. But wait, you can already run Boxee on an Apple TV, Windows, Mac or Linux and the XBMC spin-off has just made the beta available to the general public.

You might have tried Boxee in the past as the Alpha was made available to testers a couple of months back, but there’s a significant difference between the Alpha and Beta release as you might expect. The beta is an incredibly user friendly, pretty and versatile media playback software with all sorts of neat tricks including pulling down episode guides, show and movie posters and wrapping the whole thing up in something so slick you’ll wonder how you ever lived with with the decidedly last century looking Front Row or Media Centre.

On Mac OS there have been a few issues revolving around the Apple remote on Snow Leopard. Actually to be totally truthful it’s not only Boxee that’s been having problems with Apple’s media remote since 10.6, but all that could change with the upcoming 10.6.3. Thankfully, for those like me who are already knee deep in Boxee and are frustrated by the lack of Apple remote usability, IOSpirit has come to the rescue with their alternative IR driver for Mac, Candelair.

Candelair is a small and free part of their Remote Buddy software that can seemlessly replace the Apple IR driver using a preference pane. By installing it and switching on Legacy support you can get back all the Apple remote functionality that was lost with the Snow Leopard upgrade, including control over Boxee.

So if you’re using Boxee or another media player software that lacks Apple remote control on Snow Leopard, head on over to IOSpirit and install Candelair and reclaim that Apple remote!