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
Settings
Since Boxee started from within the enthusiast community, it is one of the more configurable commercial media streamers available today. To access Boxee settings you have to select the gear widget from the menu dropdown in the upper left corner.
Boxee Box settings are divided into seven categories: General, Social, Media, System, Network, File Sources and Adult. What you can do within each is listed below.
General
The general settings page had options for setting the current time and location. Boxee will give you a little icon telling you today’s weather based on your location. This is where you set display options as well. The Boxee Box can output 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Common to both Boxee and XBMC is the ability to match screen refresh rate to the refresh rate of your video, which you can toggle here as well.
Users with cinemascope projector setups will rejoice as Boxee supports 2.35:1 aspect ratios as well as 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10.
If you need to tweak overscan you can do that here as well. There are two routes of adjusting overscan, either manually stretching a reference image until it fills the screen or by percentage (3 - 6%). On my 42-inch Westinghouse 1080p display the 6% setting worked perfectly.
Boxee also ships a handful of test patterns as well as the ability to check for dead/stuck pixels on your display by displaying solid color patterns on your screen (red, green, blue, white and black).
General settings include screen and power saver options, both of which can be set for a configurable period of time. You can even choose to have Boxee throw up a black screen or just dim the screen when idle.
Boxee offers a healthy list of language and character set options:
And finally you can choose to turn navigation sounds on/off (although you can’t replace them with your own), as well as choose to display hidden files/folders (disabled by default).
Social
The Social settings page only tells you that you can display videos from buzz, Facebook and Twitter streams. You can’t actually enable any of those here, you have to visit boxee.tv to do that.
Media
Here you can set the size, style, color and character set of subtitle text. You can disable the Ken Burns effect for photos in a slideshow as well as change the transition time and image display time.
There isn’t much customization for music playback, just enable/disable automatic playback of the next song in a folder.
A nice feature Boxee includes is to not resolve videos under a configurable size. It prevents Boxee from indexing videos that are clearly smaller than a full length movie or episode of a TV show (e.g. that video your mom sent you of a cat licking another cat).
System
One of the coolest settings Boxee enables is the ability to display a debug information overlay on your screen. You can control the level of detail you get (e.g. only displaying fatal errors) but you do get the option to display information like CPU utilization, memory usage and current frame rate. This is awesome. All platforms should allow this level of detail as an option.
Also from the system settings screen you can select what forms of audio output your receiver supports and choose between HDMI, optical and stereo outputs for sound.
Networking
Boxee offers all necessary networking options and a few that are specific to the Box. Here you can enable/disable the integrated webserver, which is used for the iPhone remote. You can also enable windows file sharing on the Box which gives you network access to the ~300MB of free space on the device.
Boxee also serves a webpage (http://boxeeip:8080) that contains error logs useful in debugging those oh-so-annoying crashes I mentioned earlier. The webpage also tells you how hot the CE4100 SoC is and how quickly the fan is spinning (which appears to always be set to a near-silent 50%).
File Sources
The File Sources settings lets you add/remove local and network shares that Boxee is monitoring for content. From here you can also change the frequency of scanning for any source.
Adult Content
Unlike Cable TV, you don’t exactly have to pay extra for adult content on the web and thus Boxee offers the ability to enable viewing of adult themed feeds and apps on the Box. By default it’s disabled and you do have the ability to set a password lock on the option if you don’t want just anyone to pop into the settings menus and enable it.
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krotchy - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
They must use the same electronics supplier we do at my work."Oh we decided to buy 500,000 older revision PCBs because the forecast said to, even though you already pushed all of the paperwork for the latest PCB revision and we were told not to order the old one. We will just rework them until the existing stock is gone unless you want to pay us $2,000,000 to scrap them"
justaviking - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
For "average Joe" consumer products, I have ask myself, "Can I picture my wife using this?"I have to say, "No." She would probably make me return it within a week. Why?
- Inconsistent behavior. Sometimes you do this, sometimes you do that, other times you do something else. Full-screen display is an example of that.
- Lock-ups.
- Bugs.
- Sort of aggregated, but not really.
- A naming convention for files on your network? I don't see that happening any time soon in my house. I might do it, just out of habit, but my wife or kids? No way.
It's a good attempt.
I appreciate the challenge Boxee is faced with, and I'd be happy to pull the plug on my cable bill too, but I don't see it happening yet.
Jackattak - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Couldn't agree more. I would love to forcibly remove Comca$t out of our house, preferably kicking and screaming (mostly screaming), but this fails the wife test (and my wife is fairly tech-savvy).There has got to be a better way. This is not a consumer-ready product. This looked more like an alpha release review. Far too many bugs and far too little consistency.
Chillin1248 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
From what I understand from Boxee, the reason behind the strange (and internet download full) naming strings is due to the IMDB service that identifies the movies and shows. This is completely separate from Boxee.bernstein - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Quote: "You can’t build a similarly capable HTPC with better power characteristics than the Boxee Box (simply because Intel won’t sell you a CE4100)."This is just wrong... go to to www.pandaboard.org (or heck even a beagleboard) and get a beagleboard friendly build of linux/xbmc and you've definately got a more power-efficient htpc... best suited for 1080p playback...
and just how does a piece of hardware with 10w standby power have best power characteristics? heck not any notebook will consume anywhere near that power in standby...
now nough harsh words. great article, as always. a delight to read.
ganeshts - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Why do you think Boxee went off from Tegra 2 to Intel CE 4100? And the Pandaboard you are talking about is OMAP4 based.. Surprise Surprise.. OMAP4 host CPU = Tegra 2 host CPU, and the power profile of both is approximately the same.. so the capabilities of both are going to be similar.. in other words, don't expect 1080p60 or any other complex encoding playback!vhawkxi - Friday, November 26, 2010 - link
My sister brought me one from Canada as South Africa is again looked over as a country where people would like to have the device.I just love it, so much better than the MVIX device I had to use as media streamer up to now.
The networking works flawlessly and the 802.11 n wireless is more than sufficient to watch content in 1080p 24Hz.
Contents is currently an issue but as soon as Hulu is up and running, I will have access to the source I have been using on the software version. So I am happy with that.
The browser is still a work in progress but I assume it will eventually get there and allow nice browsing on my TV.
So overall - even at $199 which I was more than happy to pay - it is a nice product with great potential - and it has already received 2 system upgraded in the last week. Much more than one can say of similar devices that gets bug fixes once or twice a year.
Well done dudes - this may still be a winner !!
trip1ex - Monday, November 29, 2010 - link
About as expected. IT's a device that wants to give the consumer something it can't deliver - free cable tv.It's telling that the article felt it had to have the same number of pros as cons. YOu can tell this is the case when one pro says "it can only get better."
And another says, "they are pro-active at fixing bugs."
I sense some allegiance to Boxee. Maybe because they are a small company. Or because they have a personal relationship with those at the company.
In any case ....why wouldn't the folks who would tolerate bugs and problems just use a pc with their TV in the first place?
wadsworth - Monday, November 29, 2010 - link
Love it. The new Thanksgiving firmware update fixed a ton of issues I had with 720p and 1080p non-MP4 codecs. The thing played everything I threw at it, from flv to mkv. The show/movie stuff was okay, but nothing compared to the "apps" component IMO. It is up to 142 web interface apps with everything from MediaFly to YouPorn. Heck, I didn't even know Sarah Lane was doing stuff with Leo nowadays. Moving through your own files is fast/smooth, unlike my WD TV Live.saltyzip - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Boxee has so much promise, but it doesn't deliver on the most important aspect which is speed and reliability, especially when it comes to HD content.I have evaluated the free downloadable version for the PC and posted my views on their forum, only to be flamed by the moderators for expressing my constructive criticism.
No support for blu-ray or HD streaming is a big issue in my books, but the general reliability of playing any kind of content is really a hit and miss experience.
I had crashing, videos only showing on half the screen, resolution not changing to reflect the media being played so was jerky.
Why would anyone want to put this onto a TV in the living room, it would drive my misses nuts.
It needs at least another year to get it right, but by then it will be too late.