Yes, I also prefer this approach.
In theory, properly hidden features will generate the same user experience as if they were not available at all. And, still in theory, you would want to design the GUI so that only advanced users would even bother looking for those settings.

Admittedly, this may not be an easy result to obtain.

Still, as far as I personally am concerned, that is what I would like, and consider a well designed, quality GUI.

The the idea being that

IF I don't want to bother or be confused or spend time in learning and setting up, I could just easily use the clear and simple default settings and even forget I can change them at all, but
IF I do want to customize, then I would want to be able to spend time and do so.

Again, I'm speaking for myself. Mkt research may well show that the hidden advanced features do not bring any significant ROI, or may even just be post-sale cost, as some here have suggested.

I realize I'm ignoring that aspect, but I was just responding to the idea that users get confused when presented with too many options.

BTW, back on to Boxee, there's a long petition on the official forum to bring back the previous UI.

So far, I'm seeing positive comments in reviews, but a lot of "unfinished" sentiment. Including in Engadget's review tonight.

It sounds like there's as much of a chance of bringing back the previous UI as there is that online petitions will ever be successful at anything

I agree that the UI has a very unfinished feel (and I'll read that review later), but I think they had the right idea to simplify it a bit. Now they just need to fix a bunch of stuff that should have been done already.

Bruno, I responded to Avner's reply (he'd asked me a few questions), and I included your questions.

Thanks Matt. I wish I had the energy to write to them myself.

I had brought up a number of issues with the previous UI in their forum as well, so I agree with you, some simplification was needed. What I miss about it the most however is the left-side options setting. That was a very convenient and workable solution to the issue of quickly making on-the-fly changes to your current view.

From what I've seen of their top-mounted menu, it doesn't work in that way, so in addition to adding back some of what they've removed in terms of options, they're going to have to come up with a way to shoe-horn that into their current UI scheme while making it easy and fast to modify.

If you have his ear however, you might as well also mentioned the issues I had long ago written about... Ignoring articles when sorting (this needs to have the ability for the user to define articles if it has any hope of working with titles in multiple languages), skip commands performed quickly show poor performance in moving through the video - no longer freezes, but still kinda crappy.

Bruno, I just received a response from Avner (we're totally on a first name basis now, real BFFs). Here's what he says:

• A new question from me was whether they'd support Amazon VOD. What with the whole big Amazon preorder, it seemed they'd work pretty closely with them: "we are talking with Amazon, but not sure when we will be able to make it happen" - that's unfortunate, but I have it on my Tivo at least, it just doesn't work that great there.
• Another new question I had for him was about the upcoming Netflix app. I wanted to know if it was the "old" Netflix, where you could only see your queue (which shipped with Google TV) or the "new" Netflix where you could browse the library and find everything that was available (like on the 360). Turns out it's possibly better than I was hoping: "new. new UI. HD movies. you will love it." - clearly it's not the old version, but this sounds like it could be the version that's on the PS3! That would be fantastic! 1080p and [possibly even better] 5.1 surround! I might be reading into that, but I'm keeping my hopes up
• Now your questions: I asked about only seeing 8 items at a time: "right now it's static" - interesting choice of words, but I wouldn't expect to see that change very soon.
• Will we be able to mark shows as watched/unwatched? "Yes. Its coming back."
• Will we be able to sort by watched/unwatched? "yes."

I didn't ask this in the email chain, but on Twitter I asked Boxee support about another issue I'm having. Last night I was watching one of my local videos, and no less than three times - possibly four - the video paused and started buffering. It was as smooth as I've seen video buffering done, and it didn't take very long, like 5 seconds at most, but it was still irritating.

I'll be emailing a Boxee support person about it. He asked how my Box was connected, which is a valid question, and I am hooked up via "200"Mbps powerline, but whatever speed it's running at was more than enough for my WDTV, which never once had a problem streaming video like this. I'm worried that the BB might cache too little video. It definitely doesn't pull down more than 30 seconds or so ahead, it seems...

On a separate note, HuluPlus is now available on my 30 month old Roku.

Nice! I still think Roku is a great box and they handle all the various services they have better than the others. I like that all these services are wising up to the brilliant Netflix strategy of getting on as many devices as possible. I personally won't be a Hulu Plus customer, but I'm all for the service being on all these devices.

Hulu's success still isn't guaranteed, but without these devices, there's no way they'd have even the slimmest of chances at profitability. No one is going to pay money to watch TV on their computers, let alone in a web browser.

Did you happen to ask Avner about filtering out articles when sorting? And about the FFWD/REW performance?

How about the best question of all. Why on earth did they take out all this stuff POST shipping in the first place? Were they trying to piss off 100% of their new customers?

I don't think that's true at all. I would certainly pay, but what I get in return has to be reasonable, and it's going to be quite a long time before that's the case. The networks keep dipping their toes into the water then running away scared. It's going to take a while before they grow up and dive in.


I did ask about articles in my last reply to him. We'll see what he says. I didn't ask about seek performance because frankly, I'm just not seeing what you're seeing. I see no performance issues. Sometimes I think it skips a little too far in either direction, but that's not a performance issue, just a programming one, and I can live with it.


Heh, well, quite frankly, that would be counter-productive. I'm just pleased there's a dialog and they're listening to the complaints I have. That complaint wouldn't help anything

The only point in my email that I did get a little heated was one of my points about the difficulty of accessing local media. The annoyance I had with the change was that they focus on their online content, and I think I told him it was "just terrible," possibly repeating that. To be fair, it's true. I tried queuing up a couple of those movies, and they're just not good. I mean, I like independent movies but the crap on there... I don't know what that is.

I find this statement funny, given that the guy I share my office with spent the morning telling me just how awesome he and his wife are finding the beta program with Hulu- and they use a laptop for watching (too cheap to buy a device thus far).

I know one guy does not a viable consumer base make- but the juxtaposition of your post and his comments this morning to me makes me smile.

True. I am not paying Hulu to watch TV content on my computer, but I am paying them to watch TV content on my TV.
We used to spend $70 on satellite with a Tivo, we now spend $8.99 on Netflix and $15 on basic cable - though the cable rarely gets watch and will be replaced with OTA in the Spring. Adding HuluPlus into the mix for $7.99 will add to our choice.
Though it will only add a little, I don't think that Hulu is carrying enough content yet, but I am will to vote with my pocket that I prefer the steaming model over cable.

Thanks to Bruno and Matt I won't be adding a Boxee any time soon. There is a lot of content available on various website, and Boxee is a route to getting that on the big screen, but if they feel the UI is poor, then it is not going to pass WAF.

Ok, so that's one person who "would" pay but won't actually pay. So zero sale. When I said "no one" I meant "not any number of people to make a business case." While it might do volumes that a company like mine would be fine to cater to, it would never do numbers that would please the networks nor investors. It would be like Apple trying to make iTunes profitable if the music from it only played on your Mac or PC - no iPods or other music-specific devices. A few people would do it, but hardly in the numbers that make for a very successful product - especially given existing competition.

BTW, Hulu is dropping their price to $8 per month, though I'm not sure what that gets you.




Have you ever used MPlayer or another video player where you can instantly skip forward or backward a specific number of seconds? MPlayer offers two skip amounts in each direction. VLC offers three and they're configurable. SageTV has two by default on their standard remote. When you press one of them the video jumps instantly and begins playing without a hiccup. If you press any of the skips multiple times, you can do so as quickly as you'd like, including holding the button down and the progress bar moves steadily in response to your button presses and video starts playing instantly when you stop issuing the commands.

In the Boxee software on the desktop if you queued up multiple skips like this, even just repeatedly tapping a skip command, video would freeze up and you'd be sitting there watching a paused/frozen frame. On the Box I didn't find the complete freeze, but I didn't find seeking to be instantly responsive, especially when issuing multiple commands. I'm going to have to look at this again in 1.0 to describe exactly what's going on, but if you give MPlayer a look you can also better compare what I'm talking about.

The other question (about completely bungling the release) was of course rhetorical.

I found that the 1.0 didn't even offer very good focus on online content - it was just a mess of random crap that was super difficult to navigate and there was no real solution to filtering or sorting.

Well to be fair, in all these discussions about ditching cable and going over the top, I'm an outlier who I never include in the conversation. First, I watch way too much TV, and not everything I watch is available or makes financial sense if I ditch cable (or FIOS, which I have). Plus I watch PTI on ESPN every day, and there's no way to do that without cable.


I understood what you were looking for, and I've used MPlayer for years (it's not my player of choice, but I've used it on and off for as long as I can remember). What I said is that I'm simply not seeing the seek problems you are. As far as I can tell it's instantaneous. I have noticed issues if I skip forward several times, but I had chalked that up to buffering.

Basically, I had no problem with it, so it doesn't bother me. If you send a tweet to Boxee_help I'm sure someone will respond to you


That's another problem altogether. I was mainly complaining that this "mess of random crap" was all pushed to the forefront, when I was wanting the opposite, for that random crap to be moved out of the combined local/online view. But they chose to move the local out and feature a giant list of 2000+ horrible, horrible films. And even if 1% of those are actually decent, good luck finding 20 OK movies in a list of 2000.

Ok, fair enough. I brought up MPlayer just to make sure you knew the kind of performance I was talking about (expecting). I don't have the Boxee Box hooked up right now because I'm limited to a single HDMI input until I can connect my DVDO. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do that because the parents are in town and I've been doing some renovations while my dad is available to help. So far I've put up a mezzanine in the garage and today I've started ripping out the carpet and baseboards in the dining and living rooms, getting ready to install (solid) bamboo flooring tomorrow.

So yes, I'm using you as my testing proxy.

If there's a buffering issue, it really needs to be fixed/addressed. I expect at least the same performance I see in SageTV using their HD Theater box. IMO, this issue is present in Boxee because they've concentrated most of their efforts on internet content. Which brings me to my next point.

It was brought up in the Boxee forum that perhaps we aren't the target Boxee customers. Boxee is primarily a project to play internet content. Secondary, and with 1.0 I'd say far behind that, is playing your local media. That probably worked out without too much fuss while it was a beta software-only project that geeks used, but it isn't going to fly with a lot of consumers jumping on board for the first time. I'm glad they're responding and finally seeing that local content needs to be front and center.

In addition to scraped metadata for hollywood content, I'd also really like to see an easy way to index and present self-generated content. Now that I have an iPhone I'm shooting a lot more video than I ever have, primarily of my daughter. It's much more convenient than using my wife's Canon digicam and infinitely more convenient than using a video-only product I don't own.

Anyway, I'm still putting a lot of hope into Boxee because I just don't see anyone else stepping up to the plate any time soon with something that hits all the important points dead-on. The consoles are all a write-off for this purpose using built-in media support. Apple will always be off pushing their own content. No one else has an established software platform and I can't see someone springing out of the woodwork with something completely new in the short-term.

Double vaginal, double oral?

DVDO = Anchor Bay's video scaler line (by acquisition).

Bruno, the impression I got from Avner was that while they may not, by default, make local media front and center, his wording implied that for the people who want that they would make it possible to do it. Frankly, my suggestions to him for a customizable home screen would make all of this moot. It would let me choose how I want to use the Box.

As for home videos, it seemed that he was open to making that happen. I suggested an extreme example of how they might handle it: perhaps a string in a video's filename, accompanied by identically named txt and image files for metadata and cover art respectively. In return I think he said at the very least they could let users identify a folder of media content as home videos. Really, anything would be better than what we have now, which is navigating through about 10 button presses to manually go through shared folders.

Bruno, he addressed your articles issue. I think he's open to finding a way to address the issue, at least putting in an option to honor articles in sorting.

One thing that excited me quite a bit, but that he couldn't solidly confirm, is that judging by the language he used when replying to my questions about Netflix, is that it sounds like the Netflix app will be like the PS3 version, with 1080p and surround audio tracks. That would be fantastic.

After setting up my home theater and spending what I have on gear (somewhat modest, but still an investment for me), plus the planning and work in setting up the room, I don't think I'd be willing to pay for a rental/streaming service that didn't include surround - at least AC3, preferably DTS - I'm not pushing for DTS-HD or Dolby-HD.

Thanks for the updates, sounds promising. I'm sure there's a lot going on behind the scenes to influence how the product launched the way it did, and obviously I'm curious about that, having both worked in a corporation, as part of a smaller team and being a product/software designer.

Personally, I can't believe how Boxee could have been in the works for so many years and not handle ignoring articles, but as long as it gets put into a release soonish, I'm fine. With over 700 movies you can imagine how many start with "The."

Yeah, I'm a little surprised that hasn't been worked out too.

Bruno, I do have to fess up. I specifically paid attention to how well the seeking works, and you're right, there's significant lag. I think I just hadn't noticed it because compared to how other media streamers handle fast forward and rewind, the Boxee is a dream! Frequently my wife and I would be watching video on the WDTV, and she or I would say something like "wait, what just happened? What did that guy say?" But even she understood that unless it was essential, we just wouldn't go back because the process was so painful. It made me appreciate Tivo's replay button all over again

On the Boxee Box, I still maintain that the delay in seeking that exists is acceptable to me. It's not ideal, no. But then again, I'm having trouble thinking of any aspect of any of these streamers that's "ideal" It all seems to be "livable." But again, that's a big step forward. I've been using these devices for the past 5 or so years, and when I think about this piece of crap it makes me want to cry!

How many articles do you ignore if you have a documentary film about a music band, titled "The The: The untold story"?

Pardon me for not reading this entire thread in detail, but.. just how much of a delay is there for this on the Boxee?

Is it re-downloading the data again before it can replay it, or is it just an internal buffering delay? How long of a delay?

I'm used to pretty much instantaneous skip forward/back with MythTV, so I'm kinda curious how the rest of the world manages things.

I'm used to the same thing with SageTV. With the Boxee software running in Mac OS, queueing up FWD/REW operations would actually make the video freeze for quite a a while. In fact, unless you were doing anything but one to a few operations (and then not super quickly) it was completely unusable. You could not skip around through 30 minutes using the 30 second skip for instance.

With Sage, I can use the 10 second skip and FWD or REW throughthe entirety of a 2 hour movie without any issue what-so-ever. Or I can use 30 second or 2:30 - I have 10 and 2:30 set on my remote because those are the most useful for TV commercial breaks.

Its something with the XBMC core or whatever library it is using to handle the streaming as it shouldn't need to have that pause. It seeks around checking something. You'll see a massive pause if you try to start streaming a DVD over the network as well. Streaming the same thing via WMP works fine but the DVD player inside OSX is very jerky with the same file. *shrug*

Hey Matt, has there been any indication of when we might expect the first post-1.0 update?

Not that I know of. I thought I heard something about major updates coming every six months, with frequent updates in between, but I have no idea what that means, and that could have been every three months, I'm not certain.

*edit*
I do know that I'm starting to wish I could choose the speed of the FF and RW button presses. They're programmed to be a tad too long for my taste. It looks like about 30 seconds, when I'd prefer 10.

There's also a 7 second FWD/REV in the beta software, but it can't be accessed by the included remote obviously. You should be able to access the 10 minute skips by using the UI.

From using SageTV I've come to the conclusion that if you're only going to use two times for each direction, 10 seconds and 2:30 (two minutes and thirty seconds) are just about perfect. If something has commercials those two times allow you to skip through them easily and accurately. 10 seconds is perfect to skip back to see that scene or listen to that clip of dialog you just missed. Holding down either allows you to skip through as much or as little of a video as you want, quite quickly and smoothly.

By editing preference files in Boxee you can affect which "keys" are bound to the different sip times, but I've never heard of any way to edit the times themselves. You should mention that to them in email...

Looks like an update dropped tonight.

There are lots of fixes, but based on stuff we've previously discussed, here are some notable additions:

Add a global subtitles toggle, set to off by default
Support for showing the last letter typed in password fields
Support local thumbnails: .tbn support / folder.jpg

Oooo! I complained about this and they said it was a fix that had a priority, so I'm glad they were being honest there. I can't believe the default was on in the first place. It was highly annoying to turn it off for every single video with subtitles.

Is this on by default? Initially I thought I'd want to see the last letter, but tonight I had to enter the password to connect to a shared folder on my desktop, and do so in front of four other people, so I was happy they couldn't see my password.

What's .tbn? I can't seem to find anything on it. And is this about thumbnails for cover art? If so, sweet! I like that it fetches info on this stuff automatically, but it occasionally finds the absolute worst cover art...

I feel I should apologize to the other people on this forum. About 75% of this thread really could have been a PM between Bruno and I. We can move it there if it's annoying anyone

Yes, local cover art replacement. I saw that some people were having problems with it in the forum, but I'm not sure what software they were running, since this was before the firmware release announcement. I think the tbn is just a jpeg file renamed. Not sure _why_ of course.