I was about to buy the Western Digital media player which Hybrid8 pointed to in a previous thread, when I saw the Netgear. For no particular reason I've generally had a bias to Netgear's products, but the knock down price on Amazon UK makes me suspicious.

anybody know anything useful?

If you can wait, I have a new recommendation. Boxee Box from Dlink. It has an excellent interface and will ship with what looks like a terrific BlueTooth remote.

http://www.boxee.tv/box

I'm not a fan of the angled "box" dimensions of the unit itself, but at least it's very small an unobtrusive. All my components are being hidden inside cabinets anyway. Oh, one possible caveat for some people... It's HDMI-only for video.

You can try the Boxee software right now for Windows or Mac OS if you want to see whether or not you'll like the UI. The beauty of Boxee is that it will automatically fetch movie and series posters/covers and descriptions if your files are named somewhat intelligibly.

Since making the recommendation for the WD product, I have had the chance to set one up and play around with it quite a bit. It's got the better UI compared to the other low-priced products of this type, but it still has some niggles. The main one for me was a lack of search ability when browsing over the network. If you connect a local drive it generates a DB for all the content which allows searching.

Also since that recommendation, the Popcorn Hour guys have released (or at least announced and previewed) and new lower priced product with a brand new UI which looks quite good. It was conceived by the designer of the Moxi UI (from Digeo).

I've been playing around with the Boxee beta myself and so far I'm strongly considering picking one up when it comes out this summer. I currently use a SageTV box for both recorded TV and file-based playback, but Boxee is so pleasant to use that I'd start using it for all my movies and file-based TV episodes.


EDIT: The Boxee Box will be powered by an NVIDIA Tegra chipset.

I would hold off on that purchase if I were you.

I visited a client recently who was trying to use one of them to display my pictures. Horribly slow thing, while the basic menu system was ok, when it came to drawing thumbnails or the actual pictures it was very very sluggish indeed.

I don't think there are any really good solutions out there yet, not at a reasonable price point anyway.

What are you going to be using it for?

Cheers

Cris.

Since I looked at Amazon's site, which had no customer input, I looked at the US one, and the Netgear doesn't seem to please many people.
I just want to use it to play all the videos I have on hard disk: Currently on 2 USB drives and various PC's on the home network, but I'd want to move on to NAS.
The mediacenter PC I have in the lounge has never been really satisfactory, and not family friendly.
It seems to be some years since the first of these media players came on the market and, as we're saying, they still haven't really got there.

Sorry had to stop for the evening meal!

I just don't think that we've got anywhere near the "How did I ever do without this" feeling of Squeezebox for audio: listening to a week's BBC output on iplayer is about as far as I needed to get with internet radio, apart from soca from Trinidad, but that's another story..

IMO, Boxee is the closest thing in video to Squeezebox. At least in terms of the "magic" aspects. You don't require any server software and you don't need to pre-tag any video files. Everything is pretty much automatic once you point it to your videos (which can reside anywhere and in as many places as you'd like).

I run Boxee on my AppleTV, and I agree that it's remarkably good. It "just works" with all sorts of random videos you download from the Internet, with the exception that the AppleTV lacks enough CPU power to decode some HD feeds. Presumably, the Boxee Box will solve that problem.

Also, I regularly use Boxee to run Pandora, providing a nice way of generating background music at a party.

Bruno, mark this date, because this is one of those rare occasions where I agree with every single thing you said. And I own a WDTV Live.

Basically, you covered most of the negative aspects of the device, but there's one big aspect that annoyed me: number of clicks.

Imagine with me a scenario where you have a video stored in a folder on a NAS. Just one folder in. From the home screen on the WDTV, you have to select the following:

Video > Network device (or whatever it's called) > parent folder > folder containing video > video.

That's five button presses on a very rubbery remote that feels cheap and doesn't have a good feel to it. And that's without navigating up or down at any point.

And speaking of too many clicks on a cheap remote, lets talk about text entry. It's maddening. I think this is the biggest reason to get the Boxee Box, that they're going to have a QWERTY keyboard on the back of their remote. And despite the box being made by D-Link, which usually uses the same crap remote that all these box makers do, it looks like this new remote might actually be of some quality.


You know what it comes down to? It comes down to the interface. I can't tell you how many ways I've been trying to get media onto my TV (I've honestly forgotten), but every device I've used has had universally bad user interfaces. The WDTV comes awfully close, but it still feels less than. I mean, don't get me wrong, the WD box can play almost anything you throw at it, which is definitely an improvement over older units, but I just don't enjoy using it.

To those of you who have used Boxee, I have a question. Lets say I have all my videos stored on a NAS (the Western Digital MyBookWorld in my case). First, can I and how do I set it up with Boxee, and second, how is that content accessed in the interface? That's the most important aspect to me.

And Bruno, I now know that I'll be replacing the WDTV with the Boxee Box, and the thing that pushed me just over the edge was when you said it would automatically download images for the shows based on file names. Sweet.

Matt, I'm pretty sure we agree on a lot more than you let on. Ok, maybe not 100% of the things 100% of the time.

With Boxee, you just set some "watch" paths inside its preferences. Those paths will be scanned periodically for new content - a setting you can also adjust. It automatically sorts TV from Movies as well - you don't have to keep them in different places if you don't want to.

From the top level menu you have icons for Music, Pictures, Movies and TV. Click on one of those and you're instantly presented with the content. No drilling down.

You should download the beta and give it a shot. At least on the Mac, it doesn't install a ton of files all over the place nor does it set itself up for automatic launching or anything like that. Let it scan some folders and then check it out. The UI still needs some work, but it's still in Beta. One thing that MUST do before launch is to ignore "The" at the front of titles when sorting.

Boxee does also get some titles wrong. TO help you can make sure to include the year in the filename, but by the final release there should also be a way to manually tell it what the file is (as a correction). Hopefully there will also be a way to list the files that it has looked at but did not ID. Currently if you point it at a bunch of folders you will be told how many movies or shows it's indexed, but you won't know which ones it's skipped nor why. Kind of a PITA when you have 600+ movies and a couple hundred TV episodes.

BTW, I completely agree about the many button presses on the WDTV. I also noticed that (big time) but simply forgot to mention it.

Thanks as always for the input guys, I'm certainly going to wait: I'll have a play around with the software today.
I don't know how the boxee will fit in with the rest of my gear, it's a bit quirky(visually).
My biggest regret is that with the ridiculous broadband speed we have here, I can't use it to its full potential.

The disappointing thing with all of these boxes is the apparent inability to watch live streams. I'd like to stream DVB channels over the network and look at CCTV feeds, but it seems the only standalone devices that are capable of doing this are effectively IPTV set top boxes.

We bought an WD Live for work and were very impressed with the UI and the quality of the video output. I've got the Boxee software and it is pretty impressive, but the inability to just pick up SAP announcements on the local network is disappointing.

Anyone have an idea of how I can run Boxee in virtualization? I'd like to check it out without too much hassle

Can't you just install it in your virtual OS? I wouldn't think you'd have to do anything special with it - as long as your virtualized space has access to the network it should "just work."

Actually, I was dumb. I forgot that they have a Windows version available, so I just downloaded it and am playing with it now. It's definitely the slickest UI that will have ever been on a networked media player like this.

However, I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the damn thing to scrape my folders with my TV shows and present them in the TV Shows screen. Bruno, you said "if your files are named somewhat intelligibly," but what I'm seeing is that they have a strict naming scheme that you have to follow. However, even when I tried that, I can't get it to recognize my files. I've added my sources correctly, and I've copied correctly named files into the sources it pre-populated, and I'm still seeing nothing in my shows list.

*edit*
Ah, it seems that the naming is even more finicky than I thought. My test was with an episode of Angel. I had named it "Angel.S03E15.avi" and what worked was naming it "Angel.(1999).S03E15.avi" because I guess IMDb thought there was another show called Angel. Interesting...

*edit again*
Argh! This is really annoying. I was working out of a temporary folder, trying different file names to get it to work. I deleted the temporary folder and went to the original folder to try renaming some of those files. I named them the same way, and now Boxee is refusing to see them and list them in my TV Shows area. Grr. I'm getting less enthusiastic about this product. It seems that other people out there have this problem with Boxee as well, and I'm not seeing any solutions to it. I have named it just how they've asked me to, and yet it's still not working.

I have the Boxee beta on my Apple TV, though it's still slow and not very useful there. It did however recognize most of my TV shows. All I do is have them in a structure like this:
NAS/media/TV Shows/IT Crowd/Season 2/2x03.mp4

The movies it didn't see, as I have them stored as raw ripped DVD files, and not transcoded into a single file.

Really? That doesn't jive with any of the instructions I've been coming across out there. They all say that the file name has to be formatted in one of two ways:

show.SXXEXX.title.extension
or
show.XxX.title.extension

So, it has to be either:
Angel.S03E15.Loyalty.avi
or
Angel.3x15.Loyalty.avi

Something like that. They don't ever mention that the folder structure will affect things.

Question: are you accessing your TV shows through the "TV Shows" menu item, or through the "Files" menu item? If it's the Files menu option, then yeah, I can access anything through that, but that's not the best presentation of my media.

I keep my shows in folders. BUt Boxee does recognize a lot of different filename formats, not just the ones you've mentioned. None of my shows have periods in their filenames for example. None of them have the year either.

I'll give you an example.

TV Shows (folder on my NAS)
-Being Human (folder)
--Series 1 (folder)
---Being Human 1x01.avi
--- ..
---Being Human 1x06.avi
--Series 2 (folder)
---Being Human 2x01.avi
--- ..
---Being Human 2x08.avi


That works fine and it's how I have most archived shows labeled. For many shows I also include the episode name - however Boxee doesn't need that at all.

Example: "Dexter 4x01 Living the Dream.avi"

I also have at least one archive the way Tom mentioned - without the show's name for each file. That also works fine.

I will caution you that Boxee takes a while to index the videos. So... Leave it to do its thing and don't be worried that shows don't appear as soon as you add the path or files or rename them. Just leave it for a few hours, or better still, over night, especially if you have a lot of files. I suppose you may be testing with just one or two files. In that case I suppose it should be relatively quick, though I've never tried that myself.

Lastly, I've only ever tried the Mac OS build.

I did just think of another technical concern I have for the future Boxee Box... It's a concern in that I'm not sure if they'll support the feature I'm looking for...

Native output resolution switching. That's the ability to change the output resolution to best match the properties of the video file being played. So instead of always outputting 1080p, allow switching through 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p/24, etc.. Automatically.

That way you get as close to an unadulterated video frame if you intend to use an external video processor.

The more that I worked with Boxee, the more frustrated I got: I had real trouble with the file naming syatem and can't see how to get out of it with more work than is worthwhile.
The children we look after love "Shaun the Sheep", episodes: Titles tend to be puns on famous films/expressions etc.- Boxee's put them in "movies" with really comic results! One has come up with a soft porn film with, admittedly, monumental boobs! Most of what's on my hard drives is TV, and yet they've all gone in to Movies.
The Mediacenter UI copes better, and that's quite an admission!
Obviously, at this stage Boxee is set up for a primarily US market, but probably 75% of all it does is impressive, but unlikely to be used by me, all I need is to be able to play video from USB/network hard drives, catalogued in folder, file
format.

That's the thing, I've tried this with a total of one file in one media source. I wouldn't have thought it would take any time at all! But you're right, it does take a while. I'll have to leave it alone sometime. I want to try naming my files like I usually do (which is like your system without the 'x' in the middle of the number) and see how it handles it.


Sorry to start disagreeing again, but that's hardly a concern that most people have. Basically I'm just saying that this is the least challenge to Boxee's future success. Way behind things like adoption by the average consumer, fights with the networks, and finally finding a revenue model.

Okay, this is totally weird. I just removed all the test sources I was using, and pointed Boxee at my large folder of Angle episodes, and it got all of them instantly. Fine, that's great.

But I have a new major concern. When I select Angel from the main "My TV Shows" menu, I'm presented with my episodes. But I also appear to be presented with all the episodes it could find online, too. Is there a way to essentially "delete" episodes individually, or not show them?

I've tried selecting only one season, which would make this a little better, but then I get the message "No results found. Please know that some content may not be available in your area." That seems like a bug to me...

I aven't seen what you're describing about it showing you episodes you don't have - at least not in our local media list. There should be a way to tell it that you
re browsing LOCAL - along the left I believe.

The feature I mentioned, native resolution switching is nothing for you to disagree with. It's important to me, but I didn't say it had anything to do with the product's success. It's a high-end feature that most consumers wouldn't have a clue about or how to use. When I have 10-20k invested into a home theater system, I want to make sure I'm getting the most out of it. So for me, or others like me, wanting the best out of external video processors (costing from $600 to $6000), it's an important feature. Most other products don't have this feature either.

BTW, Boxee is in Beta. Report the issues/concerns you're having so they can be addressed - that's the purpose of the public beta.

Another alternative for anyone with MS Media Center is the "MyMovies" plugin and its "Collection Management" application. With this app you can manually set every file with whatever meta data you want - similar to DVDProfiler.

http://www.mymovies.dk/products/collection-management.aspx

Someone is making a port of MyMovies to SageTV which I'll be testing soon. It will use the same DB managed/created by the official "MyMovies Collection Management" program. And the author has put in a browse mode that is very similar to Boxee for me.

In my example, I was seeing my TV shows under TV Shows. I haven't gone through and seen what it is missing, mostly due to how unusable Boxee is on the Apple TV. I really need to give up on the hacky method, and just plop a Mac Mini under the TV again. That would also give me h.264 hardware acceleration if I go back to just using Front Row.

Sorry, I'm guessing you meant personal future, not the company's future. That's where I was confused.

I honestly don't know what was happening last night, but now everything that I throw at Boxee is being recognized. I swear that nothing I did worked right last night, and it refused to show anything. Today it's working like a charm.

And you're right, Bruno. It's a beta so I shouldn't be too critical. But don't get me wrong, with this interface on a set top box, it'll easily be the best, most capable product in this category. The Apple TV is, IMO, only good for playing stuff from the iTunes store, which I'm sure is exactly what Apple wanted. It's exceptional at that (and it's also good for showing personal photos), but as I've said before, it's a pain to get your own media on there. The Boxee Box is like the opposite philosophy. They're trying to give you everything else.

I'm very positive about this interface. Now I just want a release date from them!

The AppleTV works fine for me getting my media on there for the most part. All I did was rip my DVDs to an industry standard codec (H.264) or have eyeTV encode to it, and added them in iTunes. Your milage may vary when using certain, umm, acquired formats that someone else encoded to some popular, but not standard codec. :-P

Overall, my primary use of Boxee in the past was to watch online streamed shows from Hulu and other sources. That really didn't work well on the AppleTV (lack of CPU power to deal with Flash, Hulu trying to actively block Boxee).

I actually didn't even mean my own future. I only used the word "future" because the Boxee Box isn't out yet and it doesn't have an exact release date. So it's a "future product."

I haven't seen any information specifying exactly how the software on the box will compare to the downloadable software but I imagine it will be pretty similar, if not identical. I can understand not necessarily having native output switching when running on a computer for which they have no guarantees of what output resolutions will exist.

I did connect my MBP out to my new 55" LCD with Boxee running and it looks pretty sweet. The UI still needs some work/refinement. For instance, the covers grid for movies and TVs is displayed too far down on the screen - the bottom edge of the bottom row of covers gets a little bit chopped and darkened. Also, when scrolling down, the top row just suddenly vanishes instead of smoothly scrolling off the top. It's distracting. Not to mention when popping back to the grid from a playing movie, the left options bar is initially displayed and then hidden again. That's the most distracting thing of all.

But it's a good start and infinitely better than the UI they had last year. And better than everyone else's UI for that matter. I hope they have plans to extend and enhance it as well. I'd love to be able to see a list of actors in a particular movie and then select the actor's name to filter al the movies by that actor.

Just a short update. After using the MyMovies Collection Manager for some time, I've given up on the idea of early-testing the MyMovies port for SageTV. The collection manager is just a total piece of shit and every second spent using it is a load of frustration.

It's a rip-off of the DVDProfiler UI, which is not at all suited to managing files. There are about a dozen other programs with better interfaces that could have been ripped off to make this at least half-usable. This program is written by the official MyMovies people from Denmark - and the whole MyMovies plugin for MCE is commercial. There are restrictions to the amount of data you can poll using the client unless you're a full customer of their product or have contributed a certain point value of data submissions yourself.

The MyMovies port for Sage is the effort of a Sage user and has to be commended. However, after reading the instructions to get the plugin installed into SageTV, I've decided to skip it until at least a one-click solution is available. There were just too many hoops to jump through.

At this point I believe I have pretty much decided with 99% certainty that I will be buying a Boxee Box when it's available. The latest beta addresses a few UI glitches I previously mentioned, though it still doesn't properly sort titles beginning with "the."

If I wanted to build/design my own solution to this problem, I'd do that. I want something polished and finished and just ready to go. I don't have much hope this level of finish will be present in SageTV itself, so I'm left with having to choose a second box for file playback.

I'm pretty much at the same point. If I wanted to go all out and really trick out my home, personally I'd probably build a multi-tuner Media Center box (possibly with the new Ceton cablecard tuners), and put extenders in every room (which at the moment would be two rooms).

But right now, I already have a Tivo and I love that interface. All I need is something that better incorporates other media. I'll be looking to Boxee to fill that gap, and from what I've seen it will do that nicely.

Unfortunately I have yet to see a date. They have a very vague release window (Q2, I think - or maybe it's "spring"), but I need something more concrete.

I remember reading "end of June" recently. But I can't remember where that was.

As far as "tricking out" - if you noticed my other thread, I'm actually making a motorized piece of art that will cover and uncover the TV - and it's going to fit into a custom wall unit and be operated by remote control. Combined with a remote control that supports custom conditional logic and variables, I'll be able to also integrate a Boxee box with my existing SageTV extender. I could conceivably even have a custom menu option in Sage that would cause an external IR blaster to turn on the Boxee box and switch inputs on my video switcher. But I'd still have to press something on the remote control to switch it over to using Boxee's remote codes.

I might be misunderstanding your plans, but I was under the impression that Boxee used RF or Bluetooth and had no IR sensor.

Its remote is RF, but you can connect an IR receiver (via USB) to use it with an IR remote. I'm hoping it works with the IR receivers I'm already selling.