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Ever wish you could get all the great free entertainment from the Internet onto your TV? Or playback your personal collection of movies, TV shows, music, and photos in your living room without having to sacrifice your laptop? Ever wish you could enjoy and share that movie, TV show, or YouTube clip with your friends on Facebook and Twitter with the push of a button on your remote, from the couch? All of this power and more is coming in a killer new box from D-Link & Boxee.

The Boxee has started recently, revealing both the beta version of its software as well as the hardware partner that will be bundling it in a standalone device. The Boxee Box comes in the form of a striking cube that appears to be sinking into the desktop The full technical specifications won’t be announced until CES, where it has already won a “Best of Innovations” award, but looking at the pictures it’s obvious that video comes out through an HDMI connector and users can pick either SPDIF optical or RCA analog for audio output. The device will connect to the Internet via 802.11n Wi-Fi or Ethernet and can take expansion through an SD card slot on the front as well as two USB ports on the back.

In conjunction with the hardware announcement, Boxee also showed off a redesigned and much cleaner user interface as part of the new beta – which is still in private testing. The service’s main menu is now displayed prominently across the top of home screen as opposed to the side, and three separate columns directly below show recommendations and activity from Boxee friends, featured videos and your play queue.

What is Boxee

Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet or a computer on a TV. Their free, open source, downloadable software for Mac, Linux and Windows brings all your entertainment into one place – whether it’s from the Internet or from your hard drive or home network. Plus, they overlay everything with a heaping helping of social by letting you share what you’re playing with friends on Boxee, Twitter, and Facebook.

The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same popular software and offers it up as a great device — the perfect companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and more. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favorite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.

In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and we are hunted as well as fun photos from sites like flickr, Picasa and the Facebook.