Netgear Eva2000 Digital Entertainer Live - HDTV Media Player

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.

Wow, that's pretty damn cool that the Box will also support IR dongles. Damn, that's a cool company with a really cool product. Waiting until the end of June (and possibly longer) is going to be very difficult And no, I really don't feel like building a box myself

I would have preferred an IR receiver built-in, but it's likely the board used was a reference design that didn't include one initially. For setting this up in a shared home theater or custom environment, IR is pretty much mandatory.

I think I'm going to test my IR receivers with a Windows installation of Boxee and then I'm going to contact them to see if they'd like a couple of receivers for testing. Of course I'll also ask them if I might get a Boxee Box for testing...

Anyone know what kind of hardware you need to use Boxee on a PC? I have an oldish PC (P4 2.8GHz with ATI HD2600 graphics card) and running with 2 screens, 800x600 (built into the box) and my TV. If I try to use Boxee on the TV, everything stutters and CPU load is 100% constantly. I couldn't get DVI/HDMI to work so I'm using VGA and it is max 1366x768 without panning on the TV. Even with this it stutters. If I try it on the built-in screen, everything is fluid. Is it just too weak hardware? I'm using the latest video drivers and all Windows updates.

Stig

Sorry, I just wanted to clarify one thing, you're running on two monitors and a TV at the same time?

Nope, one monitor and one TV.

Stig

You should be able to run decent video playback on that system whether it be from Boxee or another program. The performance on either output of the ATI HD2600 should be identical per resolution. That is, you should see the same behavior at on either port given the same output resolution.

Outputting video at higher resolution isn't generally very taxing either, so you won't necessarily experience much more load at 1920x1080 than you would at 1280x720. Example: playing a 640x300 video at either output resolution (full screen or otherwise) should be a cake-walk for that system.

The most taxing aspect of playback is the video decode and that's proportional to the resolution of the video file itself. And of course also depends heavily on the codec used to compress it. If you have assisted hardware decode this is going to help a lot, otherwise it's going to be all CPU. In this case, it also shouldn't matter where you're outputting the video with respect to the ATI card.

The stuttering I have is even without playing any videos. I can see it on the mouse behaviour. It happens as soon as I start the program when it is being shown on the TV. I can also see that when I start Boxee, there seem to be some resolution changes. I can see this because the built-in touchscreen pops up the calibration screen and this happens everytime there's a change in the graphics output.

Stig

Let's take Boxee completely out of the picture for a moment. Do you see any type of performance issues with the second display running other software? How about playing a video in a web browser or Windows Media player and moving it over to taht screen?

I installed VLC (hadn't gotten around to do it yet) and it has no problems playing on the TV. Installed XBMC, doesn't have any problems either playing videos on the TV.

In Boxee, as soon as I select to use the second screen (TV) and Test, movement starts to be jerky. I tried playing a videofile with Boxee on the TV. After it had tried to open it for playing for about 5 minutes, I didn't bother waiting anymore. With Boxee on the small screen, it played without any problems, using about 25 - 40% CPU. It was bouncing between 70 and 100% when in the menus.

Stig

Having looked at all the advice, I thought that I'd try the Western Digital, and if I didn't like it, I could always stick it back on Amazon marketplace. I've been held up by being sent a dud one.
It does everything that I want, very satisfactorily. For my money the only thing that would improve it would be to have shortcuts to your most used folders on the main menu and, perhaps, to be able to replace the screensaver with something more interesting, perhaps a slide show.

That's one of my chief complaints as well. It seems like I need to drill down about 5 layers to even start browsing for the file I want. That's mostly if it's on a network drive, but that's the only place I'll have media.


Funny enough, my single favorite thing about the AppleTV is its fantastic slideshow. I could watch it for an hour as it cycles through all the photos. That was my dad's favorite feature too. I wonder if it's patented

Just noticed that the Boxee beta update from April 19th now includes manual media correction and addition. This will allow you to fix things Boxee has mis-identified as well as add things Boxee couldn't or wouldn't identify at all on its own.

I haven't tried the new version myself yet, but hope to give it a shot in the next few days. I don't use it full-time either since I don't have a silent nor low-power machine I can leave it running on. All testing is being done on my primary MacBook Pro in anticipation of what will be available in the stand-alone Boxee Box.

That's good news, although I've found that it has started recognizing things almost immediately for me. I'm still using the Windows application, and every time I launch it I'm more eager to get the Boxee Box. Going from that interface to the WDTV Live is such a step down.

One thing Boxee seriously needs to work on, though, is their app repository. Apparently it's been down for MONTHS!! That needs to change.

But really, what they need to do is give us a freaking release date for the Box. What the heck is taking them so long? I suspect that the bulk of their work is on the software, because I'd have to imagine that the hardware is doable...

I'm pretty sure the box is entirely in Dlink's hands apart from getting updated builds of Boxee beta. I look for any news regarding the box every now and then, but I haven't seen anything since January. That's how I ended up at Boxee's site yesterday in fact.

I wouldn't expect the box to arrive until some time in late June at the earliest. If we were getting close to seeing Boxee out of beta, that might be a better indicator (if Dlink is waiting on the software).

What I've been unable to do with the latest version of Boxee is get it to properly recognize the BBC Robin Hood series. I go through the normal steps of correction and pick the proper listing (Robin Hood (2006) (TV)) but it simply won't update its DB. The best I've managed is for it to show a correct cover image for a couple of episodes.

I think the DB correction still needs some work.

The Boxee Box has been delayed until November.

It had started to look like it wasn't going to make a summer release for a while now. There just seems to be a lot to do with the software yet - it's still in beta without signs of being complete anytime soon.

Fingers crossed it's going to run well on that Tegra 2 platform - which is going to start looking really old if November slips to January.

As long as it can comfortably play 1080p, which is to say, run well, what difference does "old" make?

That said, I'm kinda glad it got delayed. Now I have a decent reason to try and build something myself that doesn't have that absurd silhouette.

Yeah, I saw their tweet. I'm pretty disappointed.

But like you, Bitt, I might try and rig something up in the meantime...

Just playing 1080p is easy with hardware that existed two years ago, especially if you wanted to stick with a SoC. The issue is whether they include enough under the hood to deal with emerging technology. For instance, does anyone recall what HDMI version the box was spec'd with? NVIDIA are also moving to better things and I doubt the retail price is going to drop when it's released, meanwhile we might see some competition implementing Tegra 3.

If you guys can figure out how to build a dead silent box to run Boxee in anywhere near the same footprint for even close to $200, let me know. I don't think it can be done by a long shot.

But there are different "levels" of being able to play 1080p (or 1080i or 720p or even 480i etc..).

Quality of the end result (moving pictures) can vary greatly, depending upon the algorithms and horsepower applied to the problem.

I used to think, wow it can do 1080p, that's as good as it gets. Except it isn't (always).

Over the past two years, I've progressed here from Wow! at seeing O.T.A. DTV for the first time, to noticing jaggies, to getting rid of the jaggies, to noticing certain kinds of motion blur, to eliminating those, to noticing blocky shadows, to smoothing those etc..

Each evolution took a new level of hardware and playback algorithms.

I think it all looks rather nice here now, watching the World Cup Finals. But I'm sure it's really rubbish, and I just don't realize it yet.

I never said that I wouldn't be getting the box when it eventually comes out, did I? So, uh, what's my alternative for the next six months?

And Mark, you've pointed out exactly why I'm worried the Tegra 2 is going to be somewhat old by the end of the year.

The BeagleBoard could do it but the XBMC port isn't quite there yet last time I checked.

At the end of the day, you'll be spending a lot of money and time replicating something you can buy for $200 even if it is does come in an odd shape enclosure so you have to decide whether it is worth it for you. You'll get a lot more options and freedom with your own box but you'll pay for that with time and money.

I assume that other manufacturers will come out with Boxee boxes anyway and you won't be restricted to the D-Link cube.

First off, screw Boxee. I used it and hated it. I'm back to using XBMC after leaving it for the Popcorn Hour because my Xbox couldn't play the content I wanted it to. However, XBMC is quite stable on more platforms (which you probably knew, seeing as Boxee is just a fork of XBMC) than just the Xbox now (in fact, they recently announced they will no longer maintain the Xbox branch). With the inclusion of VDPAU support building a box that can decode 1080p is even easier now. The Atom 330 plus Nvidia Ion is a pretty solid 1080p decoding platform.

I didn't imply that you weren't going to get the Boxee Box. I was just being inquisitive and dead serious. If anyone can figure out how to put together a box for around $200 I'm TOTALLY interested. Mainly because I want one NOW.

Chiming in here, semi-randomly, my AppleTV, which I've been using for occasional Boxee duties, has been failing in a variety of interesting ways. I've mostly convinced myself that it's an overheating problem. Apple apparently mounted the motherboard such that the CPU chip is flush with the metal case (with thermal paste between), such that the whole case is the heat sink. Well, to keep my AppleTV running, I've taken to putting an ice-pack on it while watching TV.

Needless to say, I consider this to be a stop-gap solution until something better is available. I'm decidedly unhappy that the Boxee Box is delayed, and my new TiVo Premiere (which replaced my recently and untimely deceased TiVo HD) is hardly the awesome all-in-one solution that they claim for it on their web site. Really, it's just a modestly improved version of the same thing they had three years ago.

TiVo haven't been able to do anything truly new or remarkable in over 10 years. It's a shame, but they've only themselves to blame for their stagnation.

In this area I will agree with you completely. I freaking LOVE Tivo, but since their first product, they've only done the bare minimum to keep their product up to date, and it shows.


That's the thing, I'm not. I'm going to repurpose an old PC and live with it until the Box comes out. Otherwise, why on earth would I spend $200 now just to spend it later?


Well, first off, that's subjective. I like the Boxee interface once it's all set up.


True, but you'll be spending, at the very least, $250 for a box with ION in it, and then you still don't have the incredible remote that Boxee will be offering. They'll sell it separately, but I'm sure it'll be at least $25 on it's own, so you're talking about $75 more, and it's not a purpose-built box.

It might not be purpose built, but that means you could reuse it elsewhere, if you decide that you'll like the D-Link unit better.

BTW, the DLINK box will be OPEN. They're expressly allowing you to install whatever you want on it in addition to Boxee.

Oh, and my apologies, but that box I linked to doesn't have HDMI. DVI isn't good enough for me. I'm only seeing $300 and up for something with HDMI in it...

I picked up an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 for £180 last week (eBuyer were offering them without Windows). That works out at $263. It's got HDMI. In the end, however, I've used it to replace my old file server, because the fan sounded like it was on its last legs. The new one is also much much much quieter.

I might pick up another one next month to use for HTPC duties.

A Skype plugin to Boxee or similar would be a useful feature. Granted I'd still need a simple Skype solution for my mother....but I don't think anyone is building a single button solution.

Oh, that's cool. Still, it's an ARM architecture, so your choices would be limited.

Zotac Zbox: $229

Acer Revo: $199

Both of these are recommended by Boxee themselves.

Ooma

tanstaafl.

...I'm only guessing, but I think he was talking about video, and Ooma has nothing to do with video. It's pretty different from Skype in general...


Hmm, hadn't seen that Zotac box. I wasn't entirely sure the Atom 230 could handle 1080p, though I guess it's the same clock speed, just single core.

Still, you have to buy the remote separately, and that's a big consideration for me, because it's one of the primary reasons I'm excited about the Boxee Box.

That's what the ION bits give you: an HD coprocessor.

I haven't seen one in the flesh, but I think the Asus Aiguru Touch is at least aiming to be the thing you're looking for.

Peter

Boxee might have another problem when it's released. Some are thinking that the new XBox 360 might have a cheaper counterpart come the holiday season. The idea is that as the current inventory of the "old" model 360 is depleted, it would help Microsoft to have another "Arcade" model with a smaller hard drive that could run $199. At $199, I'd really have to think about the value I'm getting with a Boxee Box.

Does anyone know if the XBox can play MKV files? I'm assuming no, so that would be a big minus.

What about the Boxee remote, the reason you don't want to pay $199 for a more generic box?

No. The 360 doesn't understand MKV containers.

Also the Boxee box should be silent unlike the 360.

An excellent point, but I feel the value exchange makes up for that. For some reason, despite the generic box being a fully-capable computer, I feel like the XBox has more home theater functionality than either the generic or the Boxee Box.

Plus, I'd love to one day have the house outfitted with 360's on each TV, to play content from a workhorse media center box with multiple tuners.

However, the flexibility of formats with the Boxee Box is appealing to me...

True, but apparently the new 360 is significantly quieter.

Whether it's significantly less red-ring-of-deathier remains to be seen.

(Still seriously considering getting one.)

The RROD appears to be mainly caused by excessive heat generation. If Microsoft hasn't fixed it by now after multiple generations of the original 360 hardware and now a completely new redesign then they're seriously slacking off in R&D.

As with any new design though I guess it would be prudent to wait for the bugs and issues to be worked out.

How quiet is your room where you'll be using the Boxee/360?

Based on the fact that it plays games? That I'll agree with; anything else and I'm pretty sure you're 100% wrong. My experience is that anything that claims to do double-duty as a home theater device does it very poorly. After all, that's why XBMC was developed in the first place.

360 is a shitty media device. If you want a good game experience, get a console. If you want a good media experience, get a (XBMC|Boxee|whatever else dedicated). If you want just one box and don't care about good media experience, get a console.

Hot off the presses: Apple has updated the Mac Mini. $699 gets you a fairly capable machine, notably including an HDMI connector and an internal power supply. It's a bit pricey if all you want to do is run Boxee, but if you want a full-blown HTPC, it might be attractive.

Yeah, I saw that this morning, and $699 is a bit ridiculous for an HTPC with no DVR or BluRay functionality.


No, I base it on a few things (granted, several of them are rumor). Once they add the search functionality, it'll be the best Netflix playback device available. There's rumor that Hulu will be coming to it (though I'm not holding my breath). And like I said, as a Windows Media Center Extender, there are few devices better at it.

The XBox 360, combined with a Windows Media Center PC, is IMO the easiest and least expensive way to get a whole-house media experience. I'm sure I'll get some arguments for other platforms, but from what I've seen it's hard to beat.


I would be shocked if they hadn't addressed this issue. It was the single largest problem with the console, after all, and the new design is clearly meant to address the heat issue. It seems like every side is covered in vents. However, I agree that it's wise to wait and see if any problems come up.

And by the way, I'm just thinking out loud on this XBox 360 thing. Besides, I'm years away from having the cash to drop on the big central HTPC that I'd require to make the extender functionality of the 360 any use to me.

I strongly suspect that when the Boxee Box comes out, I'll still be buying one.

Oh, I forgot about the Windows Media Center Extender thing. And about Windows Media Center, for that matter.

The most significant part about the Mac mini which makes it a shitty HTPC is that it's got a fan. And can't/won't do much more than a $200 dedicated box will in that role. Yes, you can run SageTV on it with some external capture devices. You can even run EyeTV (a Mac-oriented PVR) if you wanted to. But it's still got that fan.

I'm sure Apple intends to update their AppleTV. But I'm also sure it's not going to play all the codecs and container formats and will still be tied to iTunes in at least some way.

If the current rumors are true it sounds like it will be tied to iTunes in every way, even more than the current model.

Also, I prefer the way you said "can't/won't do much more than a $200 dedicated box will in that role." That's the key. I don't want to make it sound like I'm hating on the Mac Mini, because I really dig the new revision. I think it's a great box and would definitely be the Mac I'd get. The price is decent for a computer, and they've changed a lot of things I didn't like about it before, like easily upgraded RAM slots.

Having a fan doesn't bother me. Having a quiet system is what matters to me, and unless I force my (not new) mini to spin the fan at full speed, I never hear it above the noise of my DLP TV.

Correct Matt. Ideally it would connect to the telly, the bigger image been easy on my mothers older eyes, and be dead simple to use - my mother is in her 60s and has no interest in computers, which is really the only way she is going to see my daughter. Skype do have something along these lines, but it calls for a Skype enabled TV

As for Skype been different then Ooma, both can do cheap calls, so I see where tanstaafl was coming from.

Thanks Peter, I'll look into the Asus Aiguru Touch.

I have a first gen Intel Duo mini and I could never use it as an HTPC, even if it were capable in terms of processing power. It's just far too loud. I don't know how yours stacks up, but even though I may have the volume on the source loud enough to drown out a fan, it still increases the noise floor significant;y enough to bother me. Not to mention the times where the volume is very low or muted/off completely. I'm a firm convert to the client-server methodology when it comes to HTPC and media distribution.

My 2nd gen Intel Mini noticably spins up the fans if you try to play a DVD even if you rip it to the HD first.

Cheap? Try free!

Our Ooma box has saved us literally thousands of dollars in the six months we have been in Mexico. Well, not really, because if we had been paying the piratical international call rates, we wouldn't have made all those hour-long phone calls to friends in Florida, California, Alaska, and all points North.

[unabashed plug]
On the unlikely chance that someone here doesn't know about Ooma, it is a box that with internet access (just access, a cable modem or DSL line, no computer required) connects to your ordinary telephone and gives you VOIP access to any telephone in the world. Calls are free to the country that hosts your phone number (you can port your existing number to Ooma) and are inexpensive to other countries (example: China 2.5 cents a minute, United Kingdom 1.9 cents a minute). Sound quality is excellent, far superior to Vonage or Skype, and is indistinguishable to my ear from POTS. In operation it is absolutely transparent, you pick up your phone and dial (or answer it when it rings) and that's it.
[/plug]

tanstaafl.

The Vonage box I've got does the same as your Ooma box. There is a setting on the Vonage admin website that allows you to adjust the quality.

Hmm, I tend to find Skype (when doing computer to computer, my main use) is noticeably higher quality then POTS. Not sure about their calls to normal phones though. I'm probably on Skype using it around 8-9 hours a week talking to friends back in Colorado.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a monthly fee for Vonage? With Ooma, you can get a premiere account with added benefits, but for the basic service you only have to pay for the hardware and the service is completely free.

I could have sworn there was another reason I recommended Ooma over Vonage to my parents about 3 years ago, but I can't remember it at this point. I think the free thing was the basic reason. Basically it allowed my parents (now just my mom) to save an incredible amount on phone service. I think the cost of equipment was made up for about 18 months ago, so now my mom is getting great savings out of it.

And I definitely think the call quality is excellent - better than POTS.

*edit*
If anyone is considering moving from a POTS service, the international calling is ridiculous too. I had my mom put $10 in her Ooma calling "bank," and now she can call her friend in London for at least 9 hours without running out of money.

No clue. Just saying that Vonage do a box that does similar things in regards to computerless operation and adjustable call quality. I've never used Ooma.

You have no clue whether you pay for Vonage?

No clue about Ooma :P I've no idea whether it requires fees or a special invite from the CEO of AT&T to use. My post wasn't to point out that Vonage is exactly like Ooma just that you can get VoIP ATA boxes that do what the Ooma box does.

True, though I was saying what Ooma does. And what it does, it does for free, which I consider to be a pretty big feature that no other device can match

New 360 is guaranteed to never RROD.

Well, Bruno, looks like you were correct to be wary of the Tegra 2. It seems that Boxee made a very last minute change to Atom CE4100. They say it'll be able to pull off everything they want to do, so I'll trust them. I do wonder about such a switch so late in the game, though.

Still, I think I'll be preordering tomorrow

I meant to update the thread when I found out about the hardware change and pre-orders sometime last week (or was it the week before?) Oops.

Boxee works on PCs now, and the Boxee Box was a small PC by all accounts and remains so now. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be an issue, as the hardware is pretty straight forward. The software is where all the problems can come up.

I'm still REALLY waiting for them to fix the skip/seek performance. If you queue up more than a couple of skip operations the video playback just stops for an inordinate amount of time. I want (need) to be able to hold down any of the skip commands and have Boxee whip through the video for as long as I'm holding and start playback immediately when I release.

Does Amazon charge your card when you pre-order? I'd do it, but I'm curious as to where else the box will be available. I'd rather pay for it out of my PayPal account than get charged extra points by my credit card company for a currency conversion plus convenience charge.

I'm keen to get the Boxee Box, but I'm going to wait to see what Google TV ends up looking like. Part of me even wants to replace my overheating failure of a 1st-gen AppleTV with the 2nd-gen version (which, presumably, won't overheat all the time). Who knows, maybe even TiVo will build some new software for its Premiere to do all this stuff better than presently. One way or another, it seems like we'll have some real choices this Christmas.

Google: Don't hold your breath for anything that looks even 1/4 as good as Boxee. Look at all their software, including Android. Looks like dump. With Logitech as a partner, this all but cements "ugly" and dysfunctional into the cake they're baking.

TiVo: They've had some 10 years to do SOMETHING more interesting than what they first had. They've done... Pretty much nothing except bolt on some external cruft. I stopped being impressed with TiVo back in 2005 and I don't really see them going fully mainstream in the short term.

Apple TV: Total write-off at this point. Even after a jailbreak, the hardware is far too underpowered to actually do full HD. It will forever be relegated to semi-HD.

At this point, the path looks free and clear for Boxee. Nothing else is out nor on the immediate horizon that matches it in tech specs alone, never mind design and usability. I think their $199 price is going to severely limit their penetration however. It will remain a very niche solution unless they can bring that down under $150 SRP. And they need to market it as an alternative to a DVD and BluRay player, as well as an alternative to BlockBuster- in language consumers will understand. This was the biggest mistake TiVo made early on - if they had just advertised it as a digital replacement for your VCR they'd have more easily captured mindshare which they'd have had a better time converting to market share, instead of giving all the copycats years to supplant them.

Oh and regardless of the platform and price, there's always going to be some joker that thinks he can build a micro PC based on an NVIDIA ION platform for less money. When they've spent $300+ and are still left with essentially a box of loose parts and completely crap integration, maybe they'll clue in. An ION system, with all requisite pieces, including software, is still a $400+ proposition.

I'm still puzzled as to why exactly they made the new Apple TV. Hardwarewise, its very similar to the old one except no HD and its an ARM instead of x86 processor. Neither supports 1080 output at all which is pretty lame considering how widespread 1080 is these days. You could argue that streaming 1080 would be rough but you could have 1080 content on your computer somewhere else.


Yeah. You'd do it either for the challenge of doing it or because you want to customise it. If you're doing it to be cheap then you've already lost the battle before you even started.

I bought an Ion box to do just that. Got it set up in a few days running off of an SD card. Once I get an ethernet cable run, I'll be moving it to PXE booting. Either way, the only moving part is a case fan, which is a little louder than I was hoping, but is still quieter than the fan in my DLP TV set.

I do have a couple of problems. The interface sometimes gets bogged down, but I'm 99% sure this is due to the SD card being slow during filesystem syncs. And my HDMI audio driver doesn't like mono.

All in all, though, I'm pretty pleased with it. I spent more on it than a Boxee Box would have cost, but I'm left with a system that I can reuse for other things. And that is, you know, regular-shaped. (I wonder if a third party will produce a stand for the Boxee Box that will replace its missing corner.) Plus it was a fun little mini-project.

$20-$40 final BOM cost, including manufacturing.

That's why Apple produced the new Apple TV. The old one was pretty much a Mac. This one is pretty much a cut-down iPod Touch.

Ah. Guess it makes sense. Is the Apple TV still Steve's "hobby"? Higher chance of it actually being popular this time around as more people are experimenting with streaming video.

When it was announced at the press conference, it was introduced as "One more hobby," so no, Steve doesn't think of it as a big focus of the company.

The entire reason for being of the new AppleTV is the lower price. $99 is very good, but the new box really doesn't do anything new. Netflix simply isn't good enough anymore because Netflix is everywhere.

However, I do think that Boxee has a tough road ahead with that $199 price tag. I think it's worth it, but it won't have mass appeal with that price and without the average consumer being able to grasp what exactly the box does.

Hmmm... Someone else said that earlier...



There are various mental pricing barriers where one feels comfortable with an impulse purchase. $199 is just past that, IMO, but $149 is not. It's only $50, but that $50 might as well be another $200 to the psyche. What's worse is that their SRP is actually $229. I'm not sure if this is a case of DLINK being greedy and simply averse to the amount of up-front tooling and expense they may be on the line for. At CES another Boxee-enabled product was announced, but I can't remember what it was - it was from a relatively unknown producer.

That odd box shape must have added a few bucks to the cost...

Ah, didn't see that part of the post. I'm in a skimming mode today. Not all there...


Oh I definitely agree with the mental barriers of different price levels. That's why Apple will do well despite not doing a thing with the new AppleTV. $99 is an extremely compelling price for a gadget, even for people not that into gadgets. These days, $99 is an impulse purchase, especially for an Apple product.

As for the $229 price, I really have no idea where that came from and why they even dared to put that out there. Is that a legal issue? Is it a marketing thing? Are they thinking that people will look at that and say "oh, wow, it's usually $30 more (even though it hasn't even been released yet), I'd better snatch it up!" That's a bad move. I even sent a message to Boxee on Twitter, which they initially misread (it shows you the kind of ADD people a company has on Twitter if they misread less than 140 characters), and then simply said "the price for the user is $199."

Oh well, I pre-ordered one about 20 minutes ago. I still can't tell if it bills you right away, but I'll check my account later and see.

I'm actually starting to think the $99 Apple TV is also meant for more when used in a household with multiple Apple devices. Testers of iOS 4.2 on iPads are reporting AirPlay controls show up not only in Apple's own apps, but 3rd party ones like Netflix, BBC News and so on. It's not completely clear though right now how universal this is, and knowing how much Hulu hates their content on TVs, there may be a way for apps to disable this option.

Oh, I'm sure it is, and if I were in one of those households, I'd probably get one, but only my wife has an iPhone, and that feature isn't cool enough (and she doesn't watch any videos on her phone) to get me to buy one. Airplay is a nice bonus feature, but not a good selling point.

Going by the devices that are listed on the Hulu Plus site I don't think this true any longer.
If Boxee was $99 I'd have on on order, and the same for Apple TV if it did Hulu. Meanwhile I keep hoping that Roku will add support for Hulu.

Apple's $99 pricepoint on the new AppleTV puts it fully into "impulse buy" territory. It also pulls the rug out from under Boxee and everybody else who thought they could be profitable by pricing themselves in the same ballpark as the old AppleTV.

I'll bet that most consumers wouldn't know or care about the 720p vs. 1080p issue. They just know that they can click a button and be watching their movies.

I think this is best written as simply "...watching movies" - "their" movies may not be compatible with the Apple TV and making such movies so would require many clicks and potentially a bit of technical know-how.

Some AppleTV-related news (from last week with an update from this week) - NBC/Universal think that 99 cents RENTAL per TV episode is too low. Exact words from Zucker, "We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content"

Hoho.. Ok Jeff. I personally think that 99 cents is twice as much as I'd be willing to pay. I can't imagine that at 99 cents, even after Apple's cut, that the networks would be making less from this than they do from broadcast and cable. Do they make even close to 99 cents per viewer via traditional TV? I strongly doubt it.

I get the same episodes in better quality for free, over the air, all without using up ISP bandwidth and I can replay them over and over without commercials for as long as I want.

I think Jeff's involvement with Hulu is clouding his judgement.

If that's all he said couldn't he have just as easily meant it's too much? (Pigs fly, too)

Really, is this reaction a surprise? These media companies have never been interested in passing along the savings of moving to a digital age to the consumer. It seems they think I can't figure out in my head that it costs them less to sell an album digitally than in physical form. I know the argument is that now you can buy the tracks you want, but I'm not one of the people that buys music like that. I buy albums, so I'm getting screwed.

So I say: screw you, Jeff Zucker.

He also said that he's fine with $1.99 TV show episode sales, so that pretty much cements his view. $1.99 per episode? Ya, anyway.

Bruno, you asked if it bills your card immediately: it doesn't appear to.

It's going to be tough waiting a couple months for this thing. Fortunately, supposedly if you preorder you get it a little early. We'll see though. I've ordered two highly-sought gadgets this year (the Fitbit and the Square credit card reader). They both took almost five months to get to me (I just got the Square reader this morning!). I don't expect Boxee to take that long, since they're partnering with a real hardware vendor, but I'd be surprised if everything went smoothly with the launch...

The also announced Canadian pre-orders through Best Buy the other day, also at $199 which is nice. I'll probably put an order through soon and then we'll see how things go up here with early availability.


I was just reminded that back in 2007, NBC wanted $4.99 per TV episode which prompted them to pull all their content from iTunes. We know how that turned out.

NBC must think they're HBO or something.

Interesting teardown of the Boxee Box, looks like they are using the space the odd shape creates.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/24/boxee-box-on-display-at-fcc-inside-and-out/


As for the 99 cent rentals on the Apple TV, Viacom and CBS also have commented about it.



The odd thing to me about the Viacom comments is that I already get 16 episodes of the Daily Show for $9.99 via iTunes, and thats to keep. 16 episodes works out to around one month, due to the Monday-Thursday schedule.

So far here's a small list of my Boxee show-stoppers. I don't think I'll buy a Boxee Box until they get resolved (in order of importance for me):

• Can't forward/reverse skip multiple times in a row on local video - simply freezes up playback for a while, this means it's impossible to fast-forward through your video at any rate.
  
• Articles, including the definite article ("the") not ignored when sorting titles. This is an egregious bug, IMO, and it's simply inexcusable that it's still around in the latest software versions. There are currently no plans to support this!

Other important issues, but wouldn't stop me from picking up the box:

• Direct-to-video releases are not able to be indexed by Boxee, even if you can find them in the manual-correction lookup. This affects all those Disney sequels, lots of comedian's DVD, etc... Currently there are no plans to even support this.

It appears to me that they're concentrating mainly on the online-content rather that putting much work into the local library management and playback. That has me worried for the future, especially since local playback is 100% of my interest in Boxee.

Clearly, none of these are showstoppers for me, as I've already preordered the box (which I don't appear to have been charged for yet, FYI).

#1 - I'll check that out for you when I get my Boxee Box and let you know if it happens on the finished product. Who knows, maybe it's different.

#2 - That is a dumb bug, and they should want to fix it, but it doesn't bother me too much, certainly not as much as it does you...

#3 - Again, doesn't bother me much because I can't think of anything I watch that's direct to video...

Ok, here's #4 egregious design flaw with boxee.... I agree with the poster on the boxee forum, this is maddening.



The "MY...." categories/lists are supposed to be your actual local collections. Except for the TV category it seems. Boxee will also show random online sourced episodes mixed into what you have locally. And they're truly random, it doesn't show you all the episodes you're missing, just some hodge podge list. And there's no way to tell which are local and which are online, nor where the online content is sourced from, until you actually go play them! Not to mention the online stuff might come in at 200x100 resolution while all your other stuff is 720 or 1080p.

Apart from completely corrupting what should be a list of your personal media, Boxee's flawed online additions also show incorrect season numbers, incorrect episode names, duplicate episodes, wrong episode numbers, duplicate numbers, numbers out of order, content which is not allowed to be played in the current region, content that is allowed but simply won't play, etc.

Maddening - to say the least.

But, Boxee is still the only game in town. Everything else out there really really sucks in every way, especially when you give those products more than a quick glance. Even WD's new box shipping tomorrow seems like a huge bag of fail.

I've had this complaint since first using the Boxee software on my computer too. I really don't know why they don't at least give you the option to turn off sourcing from internet providers.

But still, not enough to keep me from the product. Hopefully it'll start shipping soon... It does worry me a tiny bit that they claim a ship date of "November," when that month is getting very close. I would hope that by now they'd have a more firm date.

It's the end of November from what I've seen on the Canadian pre-order page at Best-Buy.

I thought about blocking a URL to prevent those episodes from showing up, but the only URL that Boxee needs to hit for adding those items is also the URL it needs to hit to know it's online and use its apps. The URL is owned by Amazon and registered by Amazon Legal Dept.

The other issues that I have with it are that you can't easily make corrections if Boxee doesn't want you to. You're limited by what IMDB provides and how Boxee has tied into them. So you can't supply your own artwork, etc. IMO, the thing should have been implemented such that any metadata you have, including artwork, could override what it pulls from the net.

I don't really care about online media and all of my content is stored on a server locally. I wouldn't come close to saying that Boxee is the only game in town (unless you're talking about purchasing something off the shelf, which I didn't) and I'd actually go so far as to say Boxee is a non-contender for my attention based on the beta version I used.

Off-the-shelf there's nothing that comes close to what Boxee offers for local media, even with all its faults. Popcorn Hour's latest product, PopBox "looked" like it might be half-way decent, but like every other product they've released it in fact sucks very very badly and is missing so many basic playback features that it would be all but unusable. The Western Digital boxes are fine for playing back a single file out of a directory of files. But that's not what I'm looking for.

With Roll-Your-Own, there are more options, however I still don't think any other software out there has the finish and polish of Boxee. For instance, I haven't seen a skin for XBMC that I've liked yet - I can honestly say that all the time I've spent looking at XBMC has just left me completely underwhelmed and not impressed in the least. I haven't seen anything that I've liked at all about it. Plex for Mac OS, also based on XBMC has some potential, but it's still lacking.

Building out a box to run Plex or XBMC would still be at least a $400+ proposition as well. I already think Boxee Box is $50 too expensive.

On related news... Apple has shipped over 250000 new AppleTVs in 18 days. Not huge compared to their other debut products, but much higher than I expected. We'll see how some of these studio execs start singing now...

And we'll see if Boxee supports the new AppleTV. They supported the old one.

WARNING: Necro-bump.

We picked up one of these. It works reasonable well, and a lot better then plugging the laptop into TV and using that. For $99 it is a no brainer, so I sent one to my sister in Ireland, and it was plug & play, just needed a physical adapter for the power supply - which is mico-USB (or is it mini-USB?) so it could be fed of a TV's USB port as well.
For my mother we did try a laptop, but her tech skill are not that good (insert rant about dreadful UI in Skype on Windows), so she recently picked up a 2nd gen iPad, which is within her tech skills.

Clever. What's the UI for that thing? I could imagine how a Chromecast variant on this theme could be attractive, using your phone for the UI rather than yet another remote control.

You'd also kinda think that somebody would support a USB webcam plugged into a GoogleTV box, but I don't think there is such a thing. Given the apparently unexpected success of Chromecast, Google presumably has a 2nd-gen version of the product in the works, and support for external video cameras would be a seemingly obvious addition.

From this review I stole this image:

This is what you see once you've got it connected to the internet (on first connect it will did an update) and then connect it to you Skype account.

If memory serves me right there was a webcam option for the Logitech Revue, I think it only worked with a very limited set of webcams, maybe only one. Typical webcams today do very little processing, all that is handled by the computer they are attached to, after all there is plenty of horsepower there, so let the computer and the software do the work. Which in part is likely why the Revue only worked with some cameras, the ones that did the work. The camera I've linked to is fully self contained, requiring only ethernet (hard or wifi), HDMI out, and micro-USB for power.

My only concern is that this product is EOL from Logitech, and that too soon for my liking it will become a brick due to changes in Skype, that Logitech don't update the firmware to account for. A similar competing product is this from Tely Labs telyHD. And there are also some Smart TVs that support their own brand webcam, but that ties you to that TV brand, and they are a $100 to $200 add-on.

Given the horsepower in the Amazon Fire TV they could support a webcam, that I suppose it is a question of how Amazon would monetize the feature, after all it is not going to encourage me to buy more products