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
The Boxee Remote
You have two options for controlling the Boxee Box. You can use the Boxee iPhone Remote app (free) or the bundled Boxee remote.
It’s surprising that Boxee/D-Link were the first to build a remote like this. You have a simple remote control on one side, and a full QWERTY keyboard on the other. Pure genius. As a result the remote is pretty large - taller than your average smartphone, but incredibly versatile.
The actual remote side has three buttons and a directional pad. The topmost button is a play/pause button, that is only useful for playing or pausing content. The bottom button is a menu button which doubles as a back button depending on context. The directional pad is used for menu navigation, as well as volume output on the box. With your TV already on, you can effectively control everything you need to via the Boxee remote alone as a result. In the center of the dpad is a third button used to select menu items (and also to bring up a playback menu in certain situations). The multiple roles the buttons have to play can be frustrating for new users because there’s often little consistency. Try adjusting volume up/down before you take a web video full screen and you’ll get an error telling you that the video you’re watching doesn’t support the skip ahead function. Then there’s the Pandora app which uses up/down on the dpad for menu navigation and there are a separate set of -/+ controls for adjusting the volume.
Because of the simple front, the remote is easy to hold the wrong way. Whenever I grabbed the remote without looking I often found myself holding it upside down. Button feel is disappointing. All of the buttons feel very cheap and they’ve got this plasticky click to them.
The QWERTY keyboard is a wonderful addition to the remote as it makes all text entry a non-issue. You can fill text input fields you encounter with the remote’s keyboard. It’s much easier than hunting for letters via the onscreen keyboard, although you do have that option if you like torturing yourself. The remote’s keyboard is super convenient and avoids the silliness that we’ve seen with Sony’s Google TV remote/keyboard/Atari-Jaguar-controller-imitation.
The Boxee remote communicates with the box via RF and not IR, so you don’t have to point it at the box. Range is also good over RF, I measured about 50 feet through a wall and down a hall before the remote stopped responding.
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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?