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
Booting and Strange Sleep Habits
Booting the Boxee Box takes longer than expected. I measured 65.1 seconds from full power off to the home screen, including automatically logging in via WiFi. Waking up from sleep is awesome though, the system is up and running within 1.5 seconds of hitting the menu button on the remote.
The excitement quickly faded though when I realized that sleep mode on the Boxee Box doesn’t actually save any power. Remember the current version of the CE4100 reference platform doesn’t support Suspend to RAM. While asleep the Boxee Box still draws 11.2W at the wall, virtually identical to its power draw while idle but awake. No wonder it wakes up so quickly, the box is still fully powered while asleep.
You’re better off just setting the screensaver to blank the screen rather than putting the Boxee Box to sleep.
Home Simplified Home
The Boxee Box requires a Boxee login to work. Thankfully Boxee doesn’t require any personal information, just a user name, email address and password. You can sign up via www.boxee.tv or on the Boxee Box itself. I already had a Boxee login but I couldn’t remember my password, which presented me with the first problem: there’s no way to recover your password from the Boxee Box itself. You have to hit Boxee’s site with a Mac, PC, smartphone, iPad or something else with a web browser to tell it you’ve forgotten your password. With my password reset, I was back to the Box.
The setup process is pretty simple. You adjust overscan to fit the Boxee desktop on your TV and that’s pretty much it.
Boxee on the Mac
The Boxee Box interface isn’t quite as nice as it is on the current Mac/PC release of the software. It’s a bit simpler, a lot less crowded, but it feels older. Personal preferences aside, the interface is well laid out and functional at least.
Boxee Box
The Home screen is, well, home to six major hubs: Friends, Watch Later, Shows, Movies, Apps and Files.
With the exception of Files, the hubs are designed to make Boxee more than just a dumb box that streams files off of the network. Remember this thing has an Atom based Intel CE4100 with more horsepower than you need for basic streaming.
Boxee views itself as a social device and as such there’s a focus on sharing content. You can follow other Boxee users and they can follow you. Shows you like will be added to your followers’ streams and vice versa. The Friends hub shows you the content your friends are currently liking/sharing/interested in.
The Watch Later queue is exactly what it sounds like. As you browse content (both on the web and on your own network) you can simply add it to the Watch Later list. It’s a useful way to reduce the sea of content available on Boxee down to stuff you can watch when you’ve got some free time.
The main event however is the next hub: Shows.
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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?