Freebox is designed for use in a special type of computer called an 'HTPC', which is connected to a home-theatre system to watch XviD/DivX/DVD movies, play music (MP3, CD, whatever), play some emulated games, or whatever else you want to do with it.
However, these sytems do not usually have a keyboard and mouse attatched. Usually, only a remote control or gamepad is used. This is what Freebox is built to solve. It is carefully designed to be controlled quickly and easily by a remote or gamepad, with advanced options (such as adding files to the media database) offloaded to a control program on a full fledged PC.
Freebox is designed to be used on a network, so full network support is supplied. However, the network files must be accessible from within the filesystem. Under Linux, this means that they must be mounted with Smbfs or NFS; under Windows, UNC paths (\\name\share) must be used.
CD playback is supported, as well as CDDB data access (through freedb.org).
Music formats supported include MP3, Windows Media (WMA), Ogg Vorbis (OGG), and Shoutcast and Icecast streams, as provided by FMOD
Movie formats include anything provided by mplayer on Linux and Media Player Classic on Windows: AVI and MPEG natively, and Quicktime MOV with the right extensions.
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