I've been playing with the new D-Link/Boxee collaboration Boxee Box over the past couple days. I've tried many many different LAN & Internet streaming devices over the years, some have been good at local network streaming but lacking at online streaming, some the other way around, some have been good at neither. The Boxee Box is definitely trying to be the best of both worlds, but not surprisingly, it feels like a Beta product still.
For those familiar with the Boxee software, a lot of it will look and feel familiar. They made some controversial changes to the v1.0 of the UI which, when you turn the unit on for the first time, it will automatically find and upgrade itself to (it ships with the 0.9 beta preloaded on the device, but immediately upgrades itself which is a fairly smooth and quick process). The controversy surrounds Boxee moving away from unifying all local & online content under one place. Meaning, in all prior versions of the software (on PC, Mac, etc..), going to the "Movies" category off the home screen would show you a list of ALL available titles, whether they are from an online streaming source such as Hulu or Netflix (more on those later), or something sitting on your local network or connected hard drive. If a title existed in more than one place, you'd get an option of where you want to watch it from. Now? Local content is split off in it's own section under "files". Going there you can then selecft a subset of the "movies, TV shows, Music, Photos" categories that will display all available local content. This change seems to have upset A LOT of people based on reations in the Boxee forums. Personally, I don't mind it all that much, but Boxee is definitely hearing the dissatisfaction and has said they're going to try to make everyone happy with some updates soon. We'll see.
The box itself: The design of the box has received some high praise and a few pans. Personally, I like it, though when I opened the box it wound up being much smaller than I had envisioned. Seriously, this thing is tiny. I have an Acer Aspire Revo that I've used as a HTPC running Boxee, and while it is small, the Boxee Box winds up making it look kind of bulky. It has 2 USB ports on the back, HDMI out, and a 10/100 network port (why they don't include Gigabit these days I can't figure out, but it also has built in 802.11n WiFi if you'd prefer that route).
The remote: The remote Boxee and D-Link came up with this thing is designed to make using what is essentially a computer on your TV a lot easier. On one side is a very minimalistic 3 buttons plus d-pad (mainly used to navigate menus and play/pause whatever is loaded). On the back is a full qwerty keyboard. Does it work? Yes, but it has a huge flaw. There's no backlighting on the keyboard, and the letters are essentially a dark grey color ontop of the black background, meaning that even with some light in the room it's REALLY hard to see which key is which. I would hope that a future version of the remote would AT LEAST have a bright color for the letters, and hopefully some backlighting. Without it, the keyboard part of the remote is difficult to use at best. It is an RF remote so you don't have to be pointing it right at the box, but that also means there's no IR receiver in the box so universal remotes won't work out of the box. I've read that you can hook up USB Windows Media Center compatible IR receivers up, but I tried a random receiver I found in my closet and couldn't get it to function, so I can't comment on whether that is possible or not with any certainty. You can also hook up other wireless keyboards or mice such as the Logitech DiNovo Edge by plugging their dongle into the USB on the Boxee Box and they will function.
Video Playback: I tested the Boxee Box out with a variety of test videos I have on a NAS device on my local network. Boxee easily found the network share and scanned all of the content and automatically added cover art from IMDB into it's database. Every file I threw at it, which included xVid, DVD .ISO, .M2TS, Blu-Ray .ISO, and .MKV, played without a hitch. 1080p was never a problem, nor was bitstreaming Dolby True-HD or DTS-HD. I couldn't find a single thing to complain about here, it just worked and worked very well.
Music Playback: This is a major achilles heel of a lot of streaming devices. Their UI's just aren't setup to navigate a music collection with any ease or grace. Here, Boxee has always excelled at that and it's implementation on the Boxee Box is no different. It quickly scanned my music library and organized them by Artist/Album for easy navigation. Playback starts rightaway with the coverart and a visualization running while the song plays. No real complaints here either.
Online content: Boxee has always excelled here. They've thwarted Hulu's efforts to block their software, they've had Netflix on board (on everything other than the Linux version of their software). How about on the Boxee Box? This is where the "Beta" tag definitely comes into play. In short, stuff isn't really working. We found out a few weeks ago that Netflix wouldn't be loaded on the device at launch, but it's coming before the end of the year, so ok, fine. Hulu? It's gone. Boxee reached a deal with Hulu to add the Hulu Plus service to the device, but that meant ending their back and forth on allowing access to regular Hulu content on the device. For now, however, NEITHER are there with again the prommise of Hulu Plus being added in the next month or two. That's fine and will be a welcome addition, but swapping out access to a free streaming service to one with a $9.99 pricetag is a bit of a letdown obviously.
Boxee did tout the addition of the HD movie streaming service Vudu that would be available at launch. The app is indeed loaded on the box, but when you try to load it you get a message telling you to check back as Vudu would be available on the Boxee Box soon! So much for it being available at launch I guess. My guess is that Vudu's content partners are checking out the Boxee Box to make sure it complies with their content protection standards and will be ready to go soon. Vudu's big selling point is higher bitrate video and full DD 5.1 audio, so it will be a nice option once it's finally ready to go.
The rest of the apps that work right now are a bit of a mixed bag. Most are unlikely to be used by 99% of users, and a few of them don't seem to work right with blank screens, error messages, and other bugs preventing you from actually watching the content. i also tried hitting some of the 3rd party app repositories and those apps tended not to work at all at this point. Again, i'm guessing a lot of this will get fixed in updates, but are a bit of a disappointment as well.
Conclusion: If you have a lot of local content you want to be able to stream your TV, I'd say this is the best device on the market right now. It didn't miss a beat with anything I threw at it. If you're looking for something with access to a lot of online content, there's simply better options on the market right now. In a few months they should hopefully have worked out a lot of those bugs and added all teh content the box is meant to have, so at that point it may very well be worth looking at as a pure online streaming device as well, but for now, I'd wait. The remote control needs some tweaks but is a nice effort at making the Boxee experience a bit easier on the TV. Overall, it's a device with a lot of potential that's just not quite ready for primetime.. yet.
For those familiar with the Boxee software, a lot of it will look and feel familiar. They made some controversial changes to the v1.0 of the UI which, when you turn the unit on for the first time, it will automatically find and upgrade itself to (it ships with the 0.9 beta preloaded on the device, but immediately upgrades itself which is a fairly smooth and quick process). The controversy surrounds Boxee moving away from unifying all local & online content under one place. Meaning, in all prior versions of the software (on PC, Mac, etc..), going to the "Movies" category off the home screen would show you a list of ALL available titles, whether they are from an online streaming source such as Hulu or Netflix (more on those later), or something sitting on your local network or connected hard drive. If a title existed in more than one place, you'd get an option of where you want to watch it from. Now? Local content is split off in it's own section under "files". Going there you can then selecft a subset of the "movies, TV shows, Music, Photos" categories that will display all available local content. This change seems to have upset A LOT of people based on reations in the Boxee forums. Personally, I don't mind it all that much, but Boxee is definitely hearing the dissatisfaction and has said they're going to try to make everyone happy with some updates soon. We'll see.
The box itself: The design of the box has received some high praise and a few pans. Personally, I like it, though when I opened the box it wound up being much smaller than I had envisioned. Seriously, this thing is tiny. I have an Acer Aspire Revo that I've used as a HTPC running Boxee, and while it is small, the Boxee Box winds up making it look kind of bulky. It has 2 USB ports on the back, HDMI out, and a 10/100 network port (why they don't include Gigabit these days I can't figure out, but it also has built in 802.11n WiFi if you'd prefer that route).
The remote: The remote Boxee and D-Link came up with this thing is designed to make using what is essentially a computer on your TV a lot easier. On one side is a very minimalistic 3 buttons plus d-pad (mainly used to navigate menus and play/pause whatever is loaded). On the back is a full qwerty keyboard. Does it work? Yes, but it has a huge flaw. There's no backlighting on the keyboard, and the letters are essentially a dark grey color ontop of the black background, meaning that even with some light in the room it's REALLY hard to see which key is which. I would hope that a future version of the remote would AT LEAST have a bright color for the letters, and hopefully some backlighting. Without it, the keyboard part of the remote is difficult to use at best. It is an RF remote so you don't have to be pointing it right at the box, but that also means there's no IR receiver in the box so universal remotes won't work out of the box. I've read that you can hook up USB Windows Media Center compatible IR receivers up, but I tried a random receiver I found in my closet and couldn't get it to function, so I can't comment on whether that is possible or not with any certainty. You can also hook up other wireless keyboards or mice such as the Logitech DiNovo Edge by plugging their dongle into the USB on the Boxee Box and they will function.
Video Playback: I tested the Boxee Box out with a variety of test videos I have on a NAS device on my local network. Boxee easily found the network share and scanned all of the content and automatically added cover art from IMDB into it's database. Every file I threw at it, which included xVid, DVD .ISO, .M2TS, Blu-Ray .ISO, and .MKV, played without a hitch. 1080p was never a problem, nor was bitstreaming Dolby True-HD or DTS-HD. I couldn't find a single thing to complain about here, it just worked and worked very well.
Music Playback: This is a major achilles heel of a lot of streaming devices. Their UI's just aren't setup to navigate a music collection with any ease or grace. Here, Boxee has always excelled at that and it's implementation on the Boxee Box is no different. It quickly scanned my music library and organized them by Artist/Album for easy navigation. Playback starts rightaway with the coverart and a visualization running while the song plays. No real complaints here either.
Online content: Boxee has always excelled here. They've thwarted Hulu's efforts to block their software, they've had Netflix on board (on everything other than the Linux version of their software). How about on the Boxee Box? This is where the "Beta" tag definitely comes into play. In short, stuff isn't really working. We found out a few weeks ago that Netflix wouldn't be loaded on the device at launch, but it's coming before the end of the year, so ok, fine. Hulu? It's gone. Boxee reached a deal with Hulu to add the Hulu Plus service to the device, but that meant ending their back and forth on allowing access to regular Hulu content on the device. For now, however, NEITHER are there with again the prommise of Hulu Plus being added in the next month or two. That's fine and will be a welcome addition, but swapping out access to a free streaming service to one with a $9.99 pricetag is a bit of a letdown obviously.
Boxee did tout the addition of the HD movie streaming service Vudu that would be available at launch. The app is indeed loaded on the box, but when you try to load it you get a message telling you to check back as Vudu would be available on the Boxee Box soon! So much for it being available at launch I guess. My guess is that Vudu's content partners are checking out the Boxee Box to make sure it complies with their content protection standards and will be ready to go soon. Vudu's big selling point is higher bitrate video and full DD 5.1 audio, so it will be a nice option once it's finally ready to go.
The rest of the apps that work right now are a bit of a mixed bag. Most are unlikely to be used by 99% of users, and a few of them don't seem to work right with blank screens, error messages, and other bugs preventing you from actually watching the content. i also tried hitting some of the 3rd party app repositories and those apps tended not to work at all at this point. Again, i'm guessing a lot of this will get fixed in updates, but are a bit of a disappointment as well.
Conclusion: If you have a lot of local content you want to be able to stream your TV, I'd say this is the best device on the market right now. It didn't miss a beat with anything I threw at it. If you're looking for something with access to a lot of online content, there's simply better options on the market right now. In a few months they should hopefully have worked out a lot of those bugs and added all teh content the box is meant to have, so at that point it may very well be worth looking at as a pure online streaming device as well, but for now, I'd wait. The remote control needs some tweaks but is a nice effort at making the Boxee experience a bit easier on the TV. Overall, it's a device with a lot of potential that's just not quite ready for primetime.. yet.
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