Funny that these posts went up today and yesterday because I just hashed out a simple Boxee app for Mormon Messages and the video RSS feed for General Conference right before I checked the forum.
http://gonzee.tv has a great tutorial for getting an app up and running.
All of the code is XML and Python, so you just need an IDE to get it all formatted correctly. I downloaded NetBeans as a recommendation on one of the Boxee App tutorial pages. Also, you need to download Python 2.4 (I think 2.4.4 is the only one available now). Hopefully as the full release comes out in the coming months, they'll update this to version 3.
Although Google TV may be the way to go in the future, Boxee already has several hundred thousand users worldwide. Their hardware is already up for preorder on Amazon (Boxee Box) but the software is free and can be run on OSX, Ubuntu, and Windows. Its fairly simple because it operates off of RSS feeds. When a new video is posted on the actual website, the Boxee app is notified, grabs any information about it you want, including thumbnails, and displays it in any format you program it to.
What I had in mind for the app I was building on my own was kind of a centralized LDS Media Application. You could view Mormon Messages, listen to the Mormon Channel, or browse through any of the archival video of General Conference available on lds.org. Any other sources we would want to include?
Because Mormon Messages is hosted on youtube, Boxee already has all of the video control functions built-in. The GC feeds did as well, but I don't know if it was playing the flash video from the site, or buffering a download of the .mp4 podcast. Anyone know how the RSS for english video works?
While conference was going on, I opened up the streaming page in Boxee's browser, and it was able to pick up the flash video feeds just fine. There were some scaling issues when the quality jumped up to 720p, but overall, the stream was stable. There were, however, no shuttle controls or even the ability to pause playback.
That's about all I know. You've picked my brain. I'd love to work on this or help out someone who could probably do it better than I.