Mark, I can send you some Windows-based source if you'd like. And have I ever sent you one of the receivers in the past?

No, I've not yet seen your receiver.
Does it require anything extra to work with stock LIRC?

Cheers

Mmm.. actually, I suppose that issue is more likely to be with the MythTV LIRC client, than with LIRC (core) itself. So perhaps this just means more Mythtv hacking.

The latest MythTV frontend software looks very pretty, but still has silly UI niggles (like that) to deal with. I've been using 0.24 here on the Z-Box for a few weeks now, and it's definitely NOT a nice UI in the raw, unpatched state.

Gotta redo all of my existing UI patches (from 0.23) before I can upgrade the main system to 0.24. Getting a good IR remote interface is also on the list for me there.

Cheers

Yeah, it's the six-button limitation that simply isn't going to work for me. My goal was to get something that gave me many more buttons without buying another piece of hardware. It even looks like someone wrote the glue to make the Squeezebox forward commands for me, so this will probably entail little if any hacking.

Apple's decision to put an IR receiver on but cripple it is puzzling -- it had to be harder to write custom firmware to only handle six buttons than it would have been to slap a general IR receiver on there and decode it in the driver. But I guess it does create some business opportunities for enterprising developers.

Back to Boxee... I've now verified that the older revision of receiver I was selling works with the Boxee Box. It's the newest revision that doesn't work. So it appears that the Boxee code doesn't currently support VIsta-class MCE receivers, but only seems to work with MCE2005 models.

There are a number of discrete functions that aren't possible with the standard remote, but a lot of stuff missing, such as a way to jump directly to the movie list (you can jump directly to any other list however, plus back to the home screen). The most important thing missing is direct access to all the skip commands - you can still only do the 30 second skip from the remote. You can also jump directly to the start or end of a video.

While getting all of this together, it hit me that I have a PS3 Bluetooth remote sitting in front of me. I've successfully paired a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller with my Mac to play games, so I figured maybe the remote could be used to do HTPC stuff on my Mac. It looks like folks have hacked together some kludges to get this going, but no dice on OS X according to that page. A program called Remote Buddy seems to support it, but I'm trying not to dump a lot on this project until I rule out the Boxee Box. Pairing directly with OS X doesn't work for me, but the interwebs suggest that some people have gotten it to work -- I just get a pairing refused error, no matter what I select for the passcode. Maybe only certain vintages of PS3 BD remotes work on OS X or something?

Not sure how I feel about this. I think they need to focus on improving the software before they go looking for partners.

It isn't exactly a surprise though. As the press release mentions, Boxee is a software company and they're going to want the Boxee software in as many devices as possible. The current Boxee Box is a D-Link device. All of these deals will have been negotiated over many months so this isn't just a random decision last week.

At CES last year there was another Boxee device announced, but I haven't seen nor heard anything about it since.

Apparently, Boxee makes no money from sales of the D-Link Boxee Box. Not sure how they negotiated that deal, but IMO, I hope they don't continue down the road of zero device revenue.

As with all made-up moneyspinner ideas these days, they're probably hoping to make money off the back of the Web-3.0 Social network bullshit in the online content.

Which is why they don't seem to give a shit about your local content. Because they don't.

There's plenty of backlash on the Boxee forum. Many people think that "Boxee" is releasing these hardware products. They can't seem to get it in their minds that Boxee is a software company.

Iomega announced two additional products that will compete with their Boxee-powered devices. I suspect the Iomega products won't have a terribly long lifespan, that's what Iomega is generally about.

I knew they were going to partner with other device manufacturers, but I just think that before the focus on that they should work on the software. After all, it's taking them much longer to get vudu and Netflix on their platform than they said it would. Netflix won't even be out until the end of the month, and I'll believe that when I see it.

But hey, CES is here, and if you only show up with the exact same thing you had last year, people consider it a failure...

They've been working on the software for three years, I suspect they can't really afford to wait any longer before trying to make at least some money. That means putting the software in front of as many faces as possible to start.

Seeing as Vudu, Netflix et al. is how they're going to make most of their cash, you can bet they're eager to get those platforms on board.

Boxee does not develop Vudu nor Netflix software. Their respective companies do. I'm sure the Boxee guys have been a lot more eager to get everything working and release than even the most anxious consumer.

The first Iomega product is pretty much a Boxee Box in a different enclosure and with a different remote and I'm sure they've been working with it for a very long time.

Matt, can you leave your Box either ON or in Sleep/Standby for an entire day and then come back to it still up and running properly? I have to leave mine completely OFF otherwise it will hang after some hours, whether it's in standby or left on.

Last night it was left in Standby, this morning it was hung - no manner of remote button mashing would get it to respond. Screen remained black and Boxee logo light remained dimmed.

This afternoon I left it sitting on the home screen and this evening it was still outputting video, but was completely unresponsive to any remote input. One quick press on its built-in power button shut it down.

That's a very good question:

Normally, I simply leave it on at all times, and I have zero problems getting it to operate properly the next day. My Boxee Box has been powered on since the last update...

...and that's because I have to restart in order to update. So far, every time an update has come through, it has shown a notification (as you might expect), and I don't know if the problem is that I don't react to the notification for a long while or not, but for whatever reason I'm unable to do ANYthing. I can't move the cursor around, I can't select anything, and nothing I hit on the remote causes anything to happen on the screen. From what I recall, even the options I'm given are a little messed up, where one button doesn't have text in it or something.

But in the end, this isn't a big deal, as simply tapping the power button on the Box its self and tapping it again to turn it back on fixes the problem and I can update manually. And like I said, the rest of the time I simply leave it turned on, logged in, and not in standby (though it does go into its screensaver mode, of course).

BTW, one of the setup features that I appreciate is the ability to select, individually, which audio modes your receiver supports. Prior to Christmas, I could only select "Dolby Digital" and maybe one other one, but with my new receiver, I was able to select every single one (except I was unsure of the last one - do you know what that is, Bruno? sorry, I can't remember what the option was, I just know it was the last one - I'll check later...)

You're talking abut the LPCM right? I don't know much about it other than it's an HDMI-specific thing.

Unfortunately I don't have anything capable of decoding the newer DTS and Dolby HD streams. Then again, I don't have any files or content with those tracks.

My Pre-Pro (pre-amp-processor) is 7.1 but maxes out with Dolby Digital EX and the equivalent 6.1 channel DTS. No HDMI on it, so I'm restricted to SPDIF and SPDIF doesn't support the newer HDMI-specific HD stuff either. It's not currently hooked up as I'm still waiting to move on some reno work in the family room (lighting an paint).

I also quite like the ability to tell the Box what your external decoder supports. It's a nice way to let it downmix what you don't support. I do wish you could output to more than one port at once though. Currently if you set it to HDMI I don't think it will continue to output on RCA or SPDIF, does it?

Update comes out sometime today - from Boxee's twitter feed.

I really hope that general performance of the UI is improved. As it stands, the software is just not optimized anywhere close to the level it needs to be to run on this hardware comfortably.

Maybe I'm already taxing its database limits. I've only got 820 or so movies and 60 TV series currently listed though. I'd say that's a minuscule collection in terms of computational requirements.

Woot! I wonder what that will include! I wouldn't have thought that you'd need a system update for vudu support. Isn't it just an app? I would think the apps would update independently from the Boxee software...

I'm glad that I shut the box down last night. Now it won't freeze when the update comes through


Interesting, I don't have any problems with slowness like this.


Technically, anything smaller than that would be more minuscule...like my collection I only have about 150 movies and about 10 TV shows. The only thing I'm hoping for is cached cover art, which is the only UI element that seems less than 1.0 at this point (that and not ignoring articles).

That's not coming in this update. Supposedly it's in the next one. It's nice to hear they have already scheduled some of this stuff.

There's a list of the fixes posted in a sticky thread in the forum, plus some other notes scattered around.

Article ignoring is coming in this release but I don't know yet if it's a hard-coded list and setting, or a preference for both (or either). Supposedly they're also expanding the support for "nfo" files to include some title details, allowing your to override the scraper. That is also supposed to be scheduled for expansion to allow complete overriding of all data associated with a title, as included in XBMC. While a total geek-oriented feature it's good to know it's coming because it can help to future-proof the device should Boxee fold and shut down its DB servers. Though one would hope if they folded that there would be some provision for changing the server addresses the Box uses, allowing someone else to host data (or point it to a local copy).

I believe a lot of people are going to be disappointed with this update, even though a list of fixes has been posted on the forum for at least a week. Fixing this box is going to be a process that's going to take many releases. There's no silver bullet.

With regards to Vudu, I don't know if the app alone would be enough. It might have some dependencies included in this update. I'm also not sure if it will be built-in or downloaded like pretty much all the other apps.

While the update isn't live yet, they've definitely done something to their servers as I'm now able to resolve a number of TV shows I wasn't able to before today - they always produced an error. I still have a bunch of stuff I'm not sure yet how I'm going to get working in Boxee properly. Mostly foreign language animated TV shows. A lot of Anime in Portuguese for instance.

Updated posted and pulled last night. Don't bother clicking update to check for it on your Box for a while.

List of changes for when they do actually release it.

I wonder when they'll start to update the app version of Boxee again.

The file scanner seems to act oddly in Boxee. Its painful to do DVD VOBs for some reason as it doesn't always seem to be able to identify it or it generates dupes.

Keep DVDs as ISO images if you want to preserve the menu structure (AnyDVD, DVD Shrink), otherwise rip the streams into an MKV container if you want to pare it down but not transcode (MakeMKV). And if you're sensitive to file size, transcode to AVC/H.264 in an MKV container (Handbrake). Those all seem to give the best results.

Best practice for filenames is also "Movie Name (year).ext" inside a folder of the same name minus the extension. That easily allows custom poster artwork and will later allow easily overriding metadata as well. "Movie Name" should match the name of the movies from IMDB.

Considering that the desktop version of the software is a BETA, they really should bring it to parity. That would allow a lot more testing on issues that are not specific to the Boxee Box hardware.

Can you do a straight container conversion from VOB to MKV? I'm not bothered by file size but I don't really want to have to transcode everything.


Yeah. Unfortunately that isn't going to happen anytime soon. "once we feel like the Boxee Box implementation is very strong we’re going to port it over to the other platforms. no timeline just yet."

They're just concentrating on the self contained version now and that reply makes it look like that the desktop versions are very low priority. I can see them just killing off the desktop version completely.

Aha! I was actually just about to ask this question. Thanks.


"pare"


Like Trevor said: will this still contain menus and so on? The MakeMKV web page doesn't seem to say anything about that at all.

No, MKV does not support DVD menu structures. So that's what I meant by "pare" it down. Cut down the frills, like extras and menus.

MKV as a container can hold the movie and its associated playback dependencies/features (multiples of each), such as subtitles, audio streams and chapter marks, even metadata including posters. Video codec support is flexible, so for a fast rip you can stick with MPEG2 which is the native format of the DVD, or you can transcode to something else to save (more) space.

MakeMKV does not transcode the video. You'll be left with a file containing the content you've chosen in its original encoding (video as MPEG2, audio as DTS, AC3, etc..)

MakeMKV can work directly off a disc as it contains its own copy of DeCSS, but I suspect it can also read from an ISO or perhaps a DVD folder structure if you've previously already ripped the disc. I haven't tried it myself, but plan to shortly. Normally I've used DVDShrink to make DVD folders and ISOs - which I've then kept or transcoded with Handbrake to something smaller.

That's exactly what I did. I looked at all my second-tier DVDs and decided I didn't care about the special features beyond perhaps the commentary tracks, so I decided to go with MKV. It cuts down on the site a decent amount. I just watched one of my ripped movies on my Boxee Box the other night, and it looked great and was a nice convenience (over the very difficult process of getting up and putting a disc in a tray ).

Thanks for letting me know about the update. I was wondering about that. They'd tweeted something about how they were waiting to release the update until they worked out a bug in the vudu app (so I guess that particular app can't be updated separately). In the same tweet they stated that it would be released yesterday whether vudu was working or not, and I guess they technically weren't lying

Same here. To conserve space I've dropped nearly all the other audio tracks and only kept the 5.1 English one. I generally don't watch it with the commentary track either so I've not kept those in the rip. If I really wanted it then I can dig out the DVD from the boxes anyway.

That's weird...

That message has now been changed again to say it will be released "soon."

If you want the original build of the new firmware you can still download it here:

http://dl.boxee.tv/version/dlink.dsm380/1.0.3.16996/boxee.iso

And you can manually flash the Box like this:

http://support.boxee.tv/entries/328816-how-do-i-manually-upgrade-the-boxee-software