Boxee Box Review?

[chomlee]

I am not sure if this is the right location to post but here goes.

I hope Anand is in the process now of reviewing the Boxee Box that just came out. It sounds like they are indeed using the intel chip. I have been hearing some great things regarding the box. I am a hardcore admirer of XBMC and have been waiting for this device now for almost a year. Some of the things I would be interested in hearing are:

1. A review of the Apps catalog. (I heard that they don't have netflix or Hulu plus yet but they will by the years end).

2. Wireless connectivity. I heard that the wireless connection is great (fortunately d-link knows how to make a good wireless adapter). I would be interested to see if it is good enough to play a full blue ray rip like AVATAR without any problems.

3. And of course anyones general opinion.

 

[Claudius-07]

Yah I was hoping for an official review but for the meantime, there is the official forum here:
http://forums.boxee.tv/forumdisplay.php?f=23

I was this close "<-->" to just buying one today but honestly, with my current HTPC runing XBMC, it's hard to find something better.

I quickly scanned the forums, and some say the wireless is great, some say it's not. Anyhow the odds of it running a full BR rip over wireless with no hiccups is rather improbable. Anyhow way too early -- there is an update out already... it's gona take some time to get it all worked out.

 

[Brainonska511]

I was this close "<-->" to just buying one today but honestly, with my current HTPC runing XBMC, it's hard to find something better.

Why would you go to a Boxee Box if you already have an HTPC? An HTPC can do everything a Boxee can do, plus more (ie: free Hulu...).

It definitely looks like a neat little device though.

 

[Claudius-07]

Due to the fact my HTPC is a large case, takes up a crud load of space in my home theater rack, even with all the power saving features etc, I still have to think about heat, noise etc. Don't get me wrong, I love it and XBMC. My point was that I am ALWAYS looking for something smaller, quieter, easier to more, uses less power and requires me to NEVER ever fiddle with updates, new drivers etc and just requires one firmware update every so often.

 

[Brainonska511]

Due to the fact my HTPC is a large case, takes up a crud load of space in my home theater rack, even with all the power saving features etc, I still have to think about heat, noise etc. Don't get me wrong, I love it and XBMC. My point was that I am ALWAYS looking for something smaller, quieter, easier to more, uses less power and requires me to NEVER ever fiddle with updates, new drivers etc and just requires one firmware update every so often.

I understand that sentiment. I'm just thinking of it from the software side - companies have been blocking their content from going to GoogleTV like devices (forcing you to pay for HuluPlus).

 

[Destiny]

I am not sure if this is the right location to post but here goes.

I hope Anand is in the process now of reviewing the Boxee Box that just came out. It sounds like they are indeed using the intel chip. I have been hearing some great things regarding the box. I am a hardcore admirer of XBMC and have been waiting for this device now for almost a year. Some of the things I would be interested in hearing are:

1. A review of the Apps catalog. (I heard that they don't have netflix or Hulu plus yet but they will by the years end).

2. Wireless connectivity. I heard that the wireless connection is great (fortunately d-link knows how to make a good wireless adapter). I would be interested to see if it is good enough to play a full blue ray rip like AVATAR without any problems.

3. And of course anyones general opinion.

This is the correct forum to post this thread...:biggrin:

1. They may have to enable DRM or some kind of copyright protection for Netflix or Hulu Plus (Not sure... but so far other media players that have netflix have built in copyright protection and macrovision on the SOC).

2. A few months ago I went nutts trying to get a wireless-N throughput speed enough to stream a full blue ray rip (exactly AVATAR too!) without stutters, lagging, or buffering... I went through 4 different routers, set-ups and configurations= FAIL - and I ended up going back to wired ethernet...:'(

3. My opinion is take whats coming out for the Boxee for future features with a grain of salt because there are some media player companies don't deliver (i.e. where is netflix for the PopBox?)... just get a media player that does what you need with the features it has now instead... :ninja:

So if the Boxee Box has the working featuers you need/want now - get it... if not get something else or wait for the features to become available then get it...

 

[Drekce]

I got my Boxee Box setup last night. So far it is working great, and has given me none of the problems that others are reporting. I'm using 100Mb wired Ethernet though. It truly plays every file that I can throw at it, including some WMV HD files that usually only work on the Xbox 360 due to the WMAPro Audio.

A lot of people are complaining about setting up file shares to Windows 7 systems. This isn't really a Boxee problem, because it has been found by basically every set top box user out there already. I fought through it and corrected the problem with my WDTV-Live, so I haven't had any issue with Boxee in that area.

My only complaint right now is the music interface. It is basically the same as the desktop Boxee SW, and is very limited in its capabilities. I knew what I was getting into with that since I had used Boxee in the past, so I can't really ding them for that.

 

[chomlee]

The reason why I asked about the BD playback over wireless is mainly because if it did work on the Boxee Box, it would be an unbelievable feat, because I don't think any other player will do that. Currently I have a Patriot Box Office (PBO), and for the price (54.00 at newegg when it is on sale), you really cant beat it. It streams all of my content at home without any problems. The BD rips would not stream very well over the wired network so I had to creat an NFS share. Once I successfully created an NFS share, everything worked great.

Anyhow, I was interested in Boxee Box because I liked the Movie Icon support as well as applications that allowed you to go get streaming videos from various sites. I also have an XBMC setup on my PC, but I would say that 80% of the python scripts that I have downloaded don't work (CBS, NBC, etc.). I also figured that the Boxee Box will have some open source support that you could get hombrew scripts from people.

 

[the DRIZZLE]

Definitely interesting in this. My biggest concern is that it be able to reliably play video files, even if they were encoded with non-standard settings. Has anybody found any files that the boxee box won't play?

 

[Slick5150]

I haven't found one yet that it won't play, ranging from saved streaming media to 1080P .MKVs and .M2TS files. It's a REALLY solid network video player. It's the online streaming content that's lacking at this point.

 

[the DRIZZLE]

I haven't found one yet that it won't play, ranging from saved streaming media to 1080P .MKVs and .M2TS files. It's a REALLY solid network video player. It's the online streaming content that's lacking at this point.

Thats good to hear. I've been streaming .mkvs to my xbox360 for a while but its really hit or miss. Also FF and RW don't really work on .mkvs on the 360 either.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Engadget Review

 

[Modelworks]

Overall it looks decent, though I can't say I like the form factor. The network complaints you always here about devices like this. 99&#37; of the time it is the fault of the user who has a home network configured wrong. They could fix it if they ran wireshark to see why it isn't working but when you suggest that they lash out in anger that they shouldn't have to make their network compliant with some box when their windows pc works.

FF and RW on MKV is tough for any product. Very few do it 100% correct.

I'm not venturing into anymore set top boxes until I see the marvel products.

 

[Destiny]

Overall it looks decent, though I can't say I like the form factor. The network complaints you always here about devices like this. 99&#37; of the time it is the fault of the user who has a home network configured wrong. They could fix it if they ran wireshark to see why it isn't working but when you suggest that they lash out in anger that they shouldn't have to make their network compliant with some box when their windows pc works.

FF and RW on MKV is tough for any product. Very few do it 100% correct.

I'm not venturing into anymore set top boxes until I see the marvel products.

I just got my Boxee Box today and so far I'm not impressed... Some of the button commands don't fuction properly - for example when I try to use the delete button to delete a file from a USB external HDD it just exists out to the previous screen. Most of the APPs are not working or says coming soon?

Regarding Marvell - wow media players are going to have this chipset and if so which ones?! How do you know? How does it compare the Boxee's chipset, Nvidia Tegras, Sigmas and Realteks?

 

[Destiny]

Upate:

I got the Boxee Box up and running with my network - but I had to use wired ethernet instead of it's wireless feature.

I can confirm that the Boxee Box has the Windows 7 share issues that other media players currently have.

Regarding Blu-Ray Rips streaming - I couldn't test the wireless because I couldn't get it to work, but I can confirm that using wired ethernet 10/100 it cannot stream 30GB MKV and 15GB MKV files flawlessly. There was sever stutter and lagging.

If you media file has more than one audio channel - the Boxee may play both at the same time. I was playing one MKV file and it was playing both the commentary and the regular movie diagloue audio at the same time. If the media file has multiple language audio sometimes it doesn't default play on english - I had a few files play back in Spanish or French...

If you name the media files correctly - it does a pretty good job of scrapping the movie cover art... looks pretty nice. You have to give it some time though...

 

[Modelworks]

Regarding Marvell - wow media players are going to have this chipset and if so which ones?! How do you know? How does it compare the Boxee's chipset, Nvidia Tegras, Sigmas and Realteks?

Marvell announced the Armada 1000 chip back in May. The great thing about it is it is an ARM core, not MIPS like the sigmas and realtek based boxes.
http://www.marvell.com/products/digitalentertainment/88DE3010/


Another company has already released a product with an ARM core using the telechips platform and it shows what kind of options you can get by using ARM vs MIPS.

It is from HDX called the HDX-Bone.
http://www.hdx1080.com/where-to-buy..._blue.tpl&product_id=5&category_id=1&vmcchk=1

The interesting thing about the platform is not only can it play back all the media but it can also run the Android OS and apps because of the ARM core. It also can house a notebook hard drive and uses so little power you can plug it into your pc via usb to transfer files without a power adapter.

Supported formats are good too

MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V), MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG)
MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS)
VOB, AVI, ASF, WMV, Matroska (MKV), MOV (H.264), MP4, RMP4, FLV - Flash Video, RM, RMVB, BD ISO
Video codecs:
XVID SD/HD, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, H.264, VC-1, RMVB
Audio containers:
AAC, M4AMPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA), WAV, WMA, FLAC, OGG,AVC HD, APE
Audio Downmix:
AC3, DTS, DTS-HD MA, DTS-HD HR, DD TrueHD
PHOTO:
JPEG, BMP, PNG
Subtitles:
PGS,SubRipper, MicrooDVD, SAMI, SubStation Alpha, Advance Substation, DVD Subtitle,

That system is based off the ARM reference design here:
http://www.malideveloper.com/develo...ds/telechips-tcc8900-development-platform.php

Another good thing about ARM getting into this market is they are much more user friendly to hobby programmers. Anyone can download information from their website , unlike realtek or sigma that require NDA and lawyers to get information. With the ARM cores, Android app support and ease of use for hobby community it is going to wipe out the sigma and realtek players.