The Boxee Box Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Ganesh T S on November 23, 2010 5:42 PM EST- Posted in
- Gadgets
- Media Streamer
- HTPC
- Boxee Box
Music & Photos
Boxee’s Files hub also enables music and photo streaming from networked and attached storage.
The Box does a great job finding music and displaying album art, but that’s pretty much the extent of what Boxee can do with your MP3s. There’s no quick way to search for songs and no playlist support from what I can tell. You can just view your music collection by album or by artist.
The photos browser includes all folders with any photos in them, so you need to be careful to keep your photos segregated from things like apps. Despite Boxee’s intelligence, it does help to create individual shares based on the type of content you have (e.g. a share for pictures, a share for music, a share for movies, etc...).
Although RAW files appear in the file browser, I couldn’t get the Boxee Box to load any .NEF files taken with my Nikon D700. Performance is also a problem. Some thumbnails appear quickly while others can take a very long time to show up.
By default there’s a ridiculous amount of Ken Burns effect applied to any slideshow (you can disable it in the settings menu), and viewing photos in any directory becomes a slideshow by default. The play/pause button on the remote comes in handy.
You zoom and rotate photos using onscreen controls. The zoom function desperately needs some sort of multitouch interface, while rotate is pretty quick.
The integrated SD/MMC card reader is a great way to display photos on your TV. It’s a nice addition to the Box.
Apps
Like almost everything these days, the Boxee Box supports apps. For the most part these aren’t apps like you’d find on your smartphone, but rather collections of video content from the web. A surprising number of companies/websites have Boxee apps. There’s YouTube Leanback, revision3, TED, Flickr, Wired, cnet TV, Fail Blog, and Reddit TV among others.
You can favorite apps as well so you don’t have to scroll through the list of 100+ Boxee apps to find what you’re looking for. The apps hub is also how you get get direct access to the Boxee Browser.
There’s tons of really good free video content online and Boxee apps are a great way to get access to it. I was actually surprised by how big the Boxee app ecosystem already was.
Turn off adult mode in the settings menu and you’ll even get some porn apps, just in case you wanted a quick way to get your favorite internet porn onto your TV.
Boxee does support background operation of apps. The Pandora app keeps running (and playing music) even after you back out of the app. The Boxee menu gains a play/pause button and tell you the name of the track you’re currently listening to. Selecting the Pandora widget brings up more playback controls and a visualization. As soon as you start playing any content that has audio however Pandora pauses automatically.
The Pandora app itself is just like what you get by visiting the webpage. You give it your login information and you get full access to all of your stations. You can like/dislike songs, skip forward and even create new stations.
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sprockkets - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Let's just say for instance, you don't use Windows and use Boxee since you can.$50 HDD
$30 for Ram
$42 for the cpu
$80 for a decent case with a fanless 65w psu or $50 case with $30 hq Seasonic psu
$140 for a motherboard. That's right, just a CPU won't cut it, it needs a decent chipset with hardware acceleration as well, and a Zotac 9300 itx board fills that need.
Figure $20 to ship and you get $362.
You still end up having to pay more, and you are left to assemble it. You get more, but $362 isn't $200, nor will it work OOTB.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
You dont need to be fanless. There are plenty of low cost cooling options available that are "silent enough" without having to pay a premium for fanless. However, I bet an underclocked, undervolted wolfdale celeron wouldnt even need a fan at all. Especially if you use something like a Q6600 stock heatsink. But even if it needed a fan it would only need to run at 500 rpm, which is pretty much inaudible.sprockkets - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
That system isn't fanless, just the PSU. In either case, finding a good mini-itx case with a hq ps is next to impossible, at $50.Like you said, the fan even on a dual core 2.5 ghz processor is quite silent, but the psu one is noticeable. Still, to compare apples to apples as much as possible, I compared it with a hardware accel. chipset, and those cost more.
azcoyote - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Any chance you could test this with PlayOn.tv, particularly the HULU stream (no subscription required)???PlayOn.TV plus Netflix is how I got free of DirecTV.
Thanks!
schreinereiner - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I actually have a Boxee Box and have been using it in conjunction with PlayOn from day one and am very happy with it so far. Have not had bigger issues so far mainly using Hulu, Comedy Central, and Netflix (inlieu of a native app for the Boxee Box which has been announced to be ready in the next 4-5 weeks before the end of the year).AmdInside - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
10 watts on standby? That's a deal breaker for me. For a device that I would leave connected all the time, that is too much standby power draw.JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
For a person with "AMDInside" as their name, that's a little ironic isn't it? I mean, we're talking $10 per year at average power pricing to have it plugged in and running 24/7.gigahertz20 - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Well, so much for the Boxee Box hype, I think the next media streamer I get will be the new Popcorn Hour A-210. It's the same thing as the A-200 hardware wise I think, but the case is now aluminum and fanless, which were the main drawbacks for the A-200. I have owned a A-110 for over a year now and it has played back everything.I'd love to see Anandtech do a review of both the Popcorn Hour A-210 and the new Netgear NeoTV.
Also, the last page of the review has some spelling/grammar mistakes. Below:
"But parting iwth $199 for a product with bugs"
"You can’t build an similarly capable HTPC"
schreinereiner - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
My approach right now due to the generous return window on Amazon (at least in the US) for pre-Christmas purchases is to give it until early January and re-evaluate.I went through the early Sigma players, returned a PopBox, am still fiddling with an Acer Revo Xbmc setup and have to say that with all its shortcomings the Boxee Box is the closest anyone in my eyes has gotten to marrying on- and offline content successfully while maintaining the simplicity of a set-top box. The first firmware update to address some bugs is planned for likely the end of this week. It's already being beta-tested.
spambonk - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
" so if you want to truly save power you’ll have to shut the Boxee Box down completely."Do you chose the shutdown option, or pull the plug out of the socket?