The Boxee Box - it's here, now what?

Ok, just jumping a little ahead of myself and starting a new thread for this product instead of just tagging to the end of that netgear thread.

The box will ship on November 10th in the US and Canada and I've bitten the bullet and done did go and pre-order one. $225 after tax (free shipping) from Best Buy Canada.

I know Matt has also pre-ordered (US) so it's going to be interesting to see who gets it first.

Reading the Boxee forums it's apparent that the developers have been working on the box-specific version of the software and have not been rolling those changes into the public install-anywhere version. There's no telling what changes, fixes or features differ from the public beta at this point. And there's been nothing announced about when the public version will be on par with the Box version nor when the Box version will once again be updated...

At this point, I'm leaning heavily in the Boxee Box direction, but waiting until the final reviews are in. On paper, Google TV should be right in my wheelhouse, as I've got a Dish Network DVR that's fully compatible with it. Unfortunately, the Google TV reviews suggest that the integration is very disappointing. Now, it's likely that any potential Boxee Box integration with my DVR will also be disappointing, and certainly the Google TV boxes could get firmware upgrades that make things better, but Boxee's had a long time to get the HTPC thing right, whereas Google is new to the game (though obviously no stranger to entering a market late and being instantly competitive.)

My hope is that the impending arrival of the Box gets Google really working hard on better DVR integration and improved UI on their boxes. If not, I'll probably settle for the Box, and deal with the fact that DVR content and HTPC content will be pretty much separate.

Here's my take...

Google TV is always going to have an ugly-ass UI and it's never going to work quite right. That's how Google rolls and it's not going to change here. Like everything Google, this device will always remain somewhat of an enigma, with no one actually understanding quite what it is. It's not a streamer, it's not a rental box, it's..... Who the hell knows.

The Boxee box is not going to integrate with a Dish DVR. It may never do so. It's possible one day, provided the Dish PVR supports browsing its content over a network and they share their DRM with Boxee, otherwise forget about it. It's possible the Boxee UI will appear on other integrated products in the future however, so we can't rule out a Dish product with Boxee inside. Won't hold my breath for that one though.

If the Boxee Box doesn't live up to my expectations, I'll return it, so I feel pretty safe with the pre-order in that regard. I've already mentioned my biggest gripes with the software platform in the other thread, though I don't expect them to be resolved in the first software release for the Box (except maybe the article sorting)

I dunno, it seems to me that you're coloring your Google TV forecast too much based on the Android situation. I can see some parallels, in that there are multiple hardware platforms to support, but I'm assuming some level of learning from their mistakes, and without the carriers to worry about, they can probably keep the experience pretty consistent across the devices, with the obvious exceptions that the TV is a TV and the blu-ray player is a blu-ray player.

I'm not really sure I buy into your idea that a device needs to fit into a single category of being a "streamer" or a "rental box" or whatever. HTPCs do a lot of different things, because the home theater has become a nightmare of walled-off content. Simply doing one thing well means you're just another box that I have to switch to on my universal remote. My PS3 gives me rental and some limited local content capabilities, but not enough streaming service integration and no way to record shows on my cable/satellite. Boxee does some of these things very well and others it's just okay at. Google TV seems to be aiming at almost all of the things Boxee does well, plus the DVR integration. Why does it have to fit into one single category, and what single category does Boxee fit into that Google TV wouldn't?

You misunderstood, so I'l have to explain...



Actually I'm basing it off my research into the Logitech and Sony versions of GoogleTV. As a backgrounder on my opinion of Google design, I have the entire history of Google efforts colouring my opinion however. I rest my case.





No, I'm not talking about fitting into a mold, I'm talking about making it clear to the consumer/customer what the device is for and what it does, even if it does 3 or 4 things. Your HTPC example is good. Google TV is not an HTPC though. It is not clearly defined, which is like many other Google efforts unfortunately.

A good way to describe an HTPC/PVR to the layman is "it's a digital/tapeless VCR" - sort of implied by "Personal Video Recorder" but some people need it broken down further.

Boxee is a media player. You can simply call it a digital video player for some people. That's how you describe and position it. More in depth, it is a video player capable of playing your videos, rental videos from multiple providers, internet video for free and by subscription. Each one of those can be further broken down of course. As a media player it also handles music and photos - but like all other products that do this, the UI is quite sucky. The only decent solutions for music at an entry price are from Slim Devices and Sonos. And maybe the Apple TV is now good at photos.

GoogleTV isn't a TV. I know it can play some videos - can it play local sources? They don't seem to play that up. Does it need a keyboard and ugly-ass remote? Seems like it's WebTV. It totaly undefined and that's going to be a hard pill for customers to swallow. Google is simply used to banking on the Google name without actually doing the hard work that other companies need to do to distill their product vision into a sharp and easy to understand concept.

Hey, look who you're talking to! I'm one of the biggest Google fanboys you'll meet (yeah, I said it, it's true), but surprisingly I have no interest whatsoever in the Google TV products. Maybe it's because I already have a Tivo...

For me, there's two things I want from a media streamer. I want to watch locally-stored videos and Youtube. My Tivo can do this already, but very clumsily. To me, the Boxee Box looks to have the best interface of all the options out there.

Another thing that bugs me about Google TV is the move to integrate it into the TVs. I simply DO NOT WANT integrated products, especially into my TV. I want my TV to last for years, five at least, and I just don't see any of these devices or services lasting five years. Hell, I wish my TV didn't have speakers built-in, so I understand I'm at an extreme here, but it seems a little foolish to me to rely on any of these integrated solutions.

The race is on, Bruno! I did order a good long while ago, so we'll see who gets it first. Initially, Amazon sent me a notice saying it would get to me on 11/16, even though I'd ordered overnight shipping (thank you, Prime). Recently, though, they revised it to the 12th. I can't wait!

One last note: have you guys seen the remote solutions for the Logitech and Sony Google TV products? Are you kidding? Do these companies honestly think they're going to be able to mass market a solution that adds a huge keyboard to the living room? I consider my wife to be pretty darn geeky, but she is not going to want a keyboard sitting on the coffee table. And as far as I'm concerned, the Apple TV remote is too far in the opposite direction. Any input for these devices is going to need some sort of text entry, and I think Boxee has the right solution. You get keyboard input without requiring users to have a giant keyboard or a smartphone.

If so then I hope they finally fix the stupid design which has stuck around since the XBMC days where it chews through CPU even when idle. This is a legacy of the implementation in the original Xbox which needed the game to constantly redraw the screen as fast as it can even if it wasn't needed. The XBMC team know about this problem and its just a "won't fix" status on it.

Frankly, I'm not really impressed with the XBMC nor the fact that Boxee is spawned from it. But that's just the way it is... When I get the next beta I'll see if it does this on my Mac. I don't know how I'll verify it on the Box.

The box has already shown up in at least one BC-area Future Shop store. Despite there being three of the product on the shelf, employees would not sell them until the 10th.

I think with overnight shipping Matt should be the first person to get one. I'm not holding my breath for even getting mine this week.

Amazon is estimating a delivery date of the 12th. I don't know why it won't be the 11th, but at least it'll be this week (hopefully).

Oh, and happy birthday!

Thanks. The Box was supposed to be my birthday present to myself, but then I also went out and bought an unlocked iPhone.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's changed in the Box from the beta I have on my Mac now, but I'm a little apprehensive about it. It's been made pretty clear in the forums that the main focus of the Box is bringing internet-based streams to your TV, whereas my most important objective is playback of local content.

Okay, but Boxee supports local content better than almost anything out there, so unless they're crippling the Box to limit features that Boxee supports already, you should be good, right?

All true, but as Bruno pointed out earlier (in the other thread, I think), Boxee is intent on injecting online content whether you want it or not, and they don't give you the option of turning that off (at least, as far as we've seen).

For example, I have every season of Buffy on DVD, but I keep a video file of "Once More, With Feeling" on my computer to watch snippets of it from time to time. On Boxee, it'll create an entry for Buffy the Vampire slayer in my list of TV Shows, which is fine. But when I go into that, I'm presented with every episode that the service is able to find streaming online.

This might seem like a cool feature, and it kind of is, but I usually (99% of the time) won't want that. It clutters things up and makes it much more difficult to get to the things I want to see. If I had a quick option to turn that on (and have it off by default), that would be great, but I don't want it always on with no ability to turn it off.

Clearly this has not been enough of an annoyance to prevent me from buying the Box, but it will still annoy me during day to day usage. Unless, as Bruno also points out, they've changed this behavior on the Box and not put it into the general release.

It's as Matt has pointed out, in addition to possibility that local source payback just won't get as much attention as it might need, to address deficiencies, fix bugs and of course expand the feature set.

I've previously mentioned a number of other things, including, the inability to filter out articles when sorting, almost non-existant parental controls, impossible to add home movies or commercial direct-to-video movies, impossible to add or modify the metadata associated with movies and TV show episodes (covers, descriptions, etc.), in many cases you can't use its built-in correction mechanism to tell it that a particular file is something else (in the case of mis-identity), etc..

But generally speaking, yes, it currently offers a better balance of features than any other box out there. That's why I've decided to take a chance on it as well.

This is one thing that really bothers me. I'm really hoping they add something to address this. I know you can play files by browsing through a directory structure, but I can do that with my $99 WDTV. I'm getting the Boxee Box for its interface, and I'd love to use that UI to browse the dozens of tapes I need to digitize some day (I have way too many digital8 tapes cluttering up my bookshelves - like at least 60 of them).

Yeah, that's what I was getting at -- all of the complaints you guys have put forth are valid, but at the end of the day, there isn't anything better out there right now for local playback. I do share your frustration, though -- most or all of the problems you've cited were handled properly ages ago by HTPC solutions like Meedio (which ended up being bought by Yahoo and crippled severely, not sure if it even exists now.) The fact that the "market leader" in local playback can't get some of these things right is downright sad.

Ok I win. .

I just picked up two Boxee Boxes @ the local Best Buy. I'm on their wifi typing this on my iPhone now.

WTF? If I had known it would be at Best Buy, I would have just picked it up in the store! Hmm...I wonder if I can still cancel my order...

Wasn't the November 10th date supposed to be for the people that pre-ordered? I thought the store launch was the 17th! That darn Boxee...

Just got in as I had some other errands to run.

Here's an un"box"ing

http://twistedmelon.com/blog/nov2010.html#11101001

An unboxing? Oh dear

I don't get very elaborate. My last unboxing was a picture of the product box and then a picture of a trash can with the box in it.

With these images I just really wanted to show the relative size of the product - it's smaller in person than it looked like to me on the web.

Hmm.. Hopefully I'll have enough time to test it tonight. On Saturday I'll have my DVDO Edge scaler/switcher so that I can have multiple devices connected to my TV at the same time with a single HDMI connection at the back of the set itself. So today I'll have to swap Boxee for my Sage TV Extender.

That's what I do, at least until I get a receiver that can handle HDMI. At the moment I have a cheap little Monoprice 4-port HDMI switch, and the beauty of the model I got is that the two outputs are HDMI, which goes to my TV, and TOSLINK, which goes into my receiver. It's nice not having to change the input on the TV, just the receiver and the switch. It's not fewer devices I have to switch between, but my TV doesn't have three HDMI ports on the back, and I'd still have to run audio from each of the components to the receiver anyway, so this still cuts down on at least three cables. I'll be replacing my WDTV Live on that switch with the Boxee, so we're basically doing the same thing.

I still don't know how your Best Buy, in Canada, got the Box so early, because the stores around here have no idea what I'm talking about. I also can't believe it took me so long to figure out why I wouldn't get my overnight shipment on the 11th. It's a holiday! Does UPS take that off?

*edit*
Hmm, I guess not. I also just remembered that UPS doesn't tend to handle my overnight Amazon shipments. If the company that's delivering it does observe Veteran's Day, I would have been better off saving the $4 and getting it through UPS...

Basically, what I'm saying Bruno, is that I'm jealous!

*edit 2*
Just compared Best Buy .com/.ca, and it looks like they sell the Box in Canada but not the US. Strange...

Yeah, it IS strange. I'm wondering why in Canada they didn't partner up with Amazon as well. Must have been due to some pre-existing DLink relationship. BB has a lot of DLink stuff here. FutureShop, which is owned by BB, also has it in stock.

I don't think people are supposed to have them yet, because apparently Boxee are doing a live web stream unveiling tonight. The software on the units isn't even the final version yet. After updating you are still sent a beta download. Maybe the new software will be available later tonight.

All in all, I think they really botched the timing on this release.

Also, I just found out that apparently there's a *NEW* UI for the software debuting with the box. WTF!? There aren't any pictures of it on their site nor on the box. Big disservice to themselves not showing the UI on the box - shoppers not already intimately familiar with Boxee won't have any reason to pick it over cheaper alternatives off the shelf in a store...

First impressions not good. Too much setup, including signing up for an account before you can do anything with the device.

The keyboard doesn't feel very good in the hand - the key clicks are not responsive and need to be pressed very hard. I suspect I know what kind of buttons they're using internally.

Anyway, you can't actually create a new account. When you go enter a password it immediately says it's invalid. And the password confirmation always says it doesn't match, even when it does. Ooops!

Well, you always had to sign up for an account to use Boxee. I thought you were using it before, weren't you?

I'll probably be annoyed by the keyboard too, but it CANNOT be worse than entering in search queries on my WDTV Live. Nothing can possibly more miserable than that. NOTHING!


Apparently you really weren't supposed to get that Box today.

Yeah, I do already have an account. But my computer was upstairs at the time so I had no idea what the password or even user name for that was.

I finally got it to go after restarting the box.

It also needed a firmware update (to sep 20 version) before it would properly access shares on my network - it would always time out with the firmware it comes with.

The most annoying bug I've found so far is that it STOPS audio output on SPDIF when it is not actively producing a sound. That may or may not affect you, but with my Pre-Amp it definitely affects me. My Pre-Amp shuts of its outputs when it's not receiving a signal, so you can see on its display the DTS or DOLBY indicator turning off when Boxee stops making sound. This has the effect of eating any initial click that should be heard when moving around the UI. Only the second and subsequent clicks will be heard, and only if they come within a small time-out of you first moving the UI focus to produce the initial click.

It might be responsible also for a slight noise when pausing and unpausing. I'm waiting till 1.0 to verify again and report the issue. I MAY be able to work around it in the settings of my Pre-Amp as well, but I'll also have to look into that.

My pre-order shipped out today, but I haven't yet received any shipping confirmation from BB. Looks like I'll be the owner of two boxes shortly. It *would* be three, but the second one I have on hand now will be dropped off down the street at my friend's place in a few hours.

EDIT. DAMN, that's timing. I just received an email precisely when I pressed the submit button on this post. It's the BB shipping confirmation.

The changes for the 1.0 version of the Boxee software are significant to say the least. It looks like they've completely redone the interface in fact, keeping only the concept, but reworking the layout completely. The images in the thread I'm linking below are not that impressive - I really hope they didn't knock the cover view down to only 2 rows... Not everyone is using a 15" display - I can see more than 2 rows perfectly fine from 10 feet away on my 55" screen.

http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=21673

I'm not bothered too much by the two cover rows, but I am concerned about how it seems like, overall, they've made everything a little...bigger. I agree, when I'm 10 feet from my 60" TV, I don't need this stuff to be huge. It's going to look cartoonish. What I find weird is that those first three shots show this new "big" look, and the fourth [Die Antwoord!] has tiny text.

I'll see how I like it. I got my shipping confirmation from Amazon today. It'll be shipping one-day FedEx, and it looks like it might arrive tomorrow after all. I hope I'm home, because FedEx is annoying in my complex about leaving packages when I'm not home...

Here's an answer to a sensible question from their Q&A after the event (for which the live stream failed miserably):



I guess they think only single geeks will buy their product, not anyone with a family who might be interested in having multiple people's social networks connected at the same time.

BTW, they also removed the Photos and Music functionality from the main menu and tossed it into the Files category.

They thanked Intel and a couple of other corporates but didn't thank XBMC and the rest of the open source software. It's pretty much the backbone of this thing, and by far the most difficult part of the pie to develop from a software perspective.

I think the new UI puts the sub-menu stuff above the content, which on a widescreen display doesn't make much sense. I really liked how the optional stuff could be scrolled off to the left in the beta UI. IMO, radically changing the UI after launching the box is a bit of a bait and switch. They really should have rolled the new UI into a beta back in August to have had enough time to properly test it.

With only two rows and 4 columns, we're now only able to see 8 movie covers instead of the previous 15. Maybe there will be a setting for this (doubt it).

Positive comments now.. In the movie descriptions on the one screen shot it now shows the year and director listed ABOVE the synopsis and it now finally shows the cast too. Very welcome change IMO.

Hopefully we'll eventually be able to search by director and cast member. I'd also like to see some marker that says what format/resolution a particular movie is in. At least being able to identify between 720, 1080 and 480.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't go to crap. Firmware updates are mandatory.

I got my Boxee Box! I'm really going to need to take a while to get to know this device before I give a proper impression. I can certainly say that this is NOT the box for the average consumer. To them I still say "get the Roku, or if you have a lot in iTunes, get an AppleTV." The Boxee Box is simply too difficult to start using (hell, I'm having my own difficulties with it). But that might be due to what I want to do with it, which is watch my own content. If you just wanted to watch the random stuff them have ready for you, I guess it's kind of easy to use.

Question for you, Bruno: do you know of a way to watch Youtube in a normal way? All I can find is Youtube Leanback which I DESPISE. You launch it and it immediately starts playing a random video that you can't pause, even to let the buffer catch up. It's maddening. And there's no way to see my favorites and such. I really hate it.

Also, I'm missing that menu that would come up when you scrolled over to the left while looking at movies or TV shows. That menu let me change the sort order of my shows. By default, it lists TV episodes in reverse chronological order, which I don't want, and it doesn't look like I can change that!

*edit*

ps- It's still very slow when creating its database. It's been about 90 minutes now and it's not done making its way through 45 movies and 6 TV shows...

Matt, I still haven't played with the new UI. I was afraid I was also going to really miss the left menu - it was probably the smartest options menu I've ever seen implemented on any device. I could tune up the navigation of the remote buttons, but other than that, the concept was sound. I'm actually pissed off I didn't think of it first since it's even better than what I had thought up when I was designing this type of product. I think what they have now might be closer to what I had originally come up with for options setting.

Are you scanning over a network (wired or wireless)? Or directly connected USB drive?

Last night I set my friend's system up with a directly connected USB drive and it was pretty slow-going, but it had indexed some 300 movies in maybe an hour. What I really want to know is where it's saving all the information it's indexing.... If you unplug the drive for a day, add a couple of movies and then plug it back, how long will it take for the new content?

Unfortunately I'm not going to have time to play with it tomorrow. My place is an utter disaster zone right now and tomorrow night we have a visitor from the Netherlands and on Sunday we have my parents coming to stay with us for two weeks to help take care of our daughter while our daycare person is away on holidays. So I need to make myself really busy tomorrow cleaning and setting up a bunch of stuff. Plus moving all the boxes I just picked up from the US today... My DVDO, full PSB Imagine surround speaker set and a few other toys including my new URC MX-980 remote. I'm finally going to be able to stop using that POS Harmony 880. Phew.

Early impressions of the Boxee Box are not good, IMO. I'm a little worried here.

I figured out how to control Youtube Leanback, which I still hate because it just starts playing random videos whether you want it to or not, so the first thing I have to do when I launch it is find the pause button. But the pause button is not the play/pause button on the remote. No, that would make too much sense. I have to press up or down on the remote to bring up the playback controls, and then find the pause button there.

I understand why this is the case - Youtube Leanback is not a Boxee app, it's merely a web page, and it has to use that interface. But to the user, you don't really see that. What you see is when you press the pause button on the remote, it says something like "this video cannot be paused," which isn't true but makes things VERY confusing, even to a user like me.

Bruno, you mentioned how you didn't like how when you look at shows stored locally, it also shows you episodes available on the web. I didn't like that either. But guess what, they made it worse! Yay!

Now they've separated out local and online content, but that means it takes another few clicks to get to your own stuff. One of the reasons I got rid of the WDTV was to eliminate some of those extra steps to get to my content, so this is very disappointing. Add to that that the options you had when viewing this content on pre-1.0 software is now gone, and you have a much more frustrating experience. I can't change the sort order, browse by genre, or search my own content now, and playback of local content was the entire reason I picked this device over the others.

I'm also worried by something else. There's speculations in the Boxee forums that the Box might be a tad underpowered. There is no longer background video playback, and a set of visualizations in the music player that were apparently very popular (milkdrop?) have been removed. I don't see it as too much of a problem, but it might be a concern down the road. As long as I can play 1080p content (which I can), I'll be happy.

Lastly, I tried the photo slideshow last night. My wife and I wanted to show some friends a few photos from our SF trip. This became a disaster:

• when I navigated into a folder of photos, I got 2-3 rows of thumbnails, or what should have been thumbnails. They were just grey boxes with spinning circles in them, which I took to mean it was loading the thumbnails. But after about five minutes of waiting, not a single one had loaded, so I just picked the first file and went from there.
• things started out okay, and the slideshow mode even did the "Ken Burns Effect" you get on Apple TV.
• half of the photos had an annoying flickering white line on their left edge. I assume this has something to do with how the box was rendering them. The photos were rendered very well, but this flickering was extremely distracting to me. My guests didn't mention if it bothered them...
• the worst part of the experience was if I wanted to skip a photo. If I hit the "right" button, sometimes it would go to the next photo (presumably cached), and sometimes this would bring everything to a screeching halt, and we'd be left staring at the photo I wanted to skip, which had stopped moving, and it would just sit there forever. A couple times I could get it started up again, and a couple times I could back out. But one time it just sat there, not letting me do a single thing, and I ended up having to get up and reboot the Box. This is unacceptable for a "finished" product.
• Lastly, the Box seemed a little too slow at transmitting the data. I admit, I'm using powerline networking for this device, I haven't had any problems playing HD video at 3.5Mbps. Admittedly, the photos are around 5MB each, so at 3.5Mbps that would be about 11 seconds to transmit, but I have a feeling that my powerline adapter is going a bit faster than 3.5Mbps. So I'm still stumped.

I'm going to have to give this box a little while. I'm getting a little more "early adopter's remorse" than I usually do with this thing. There is MUCH missing from the Box:

• There's no Netflix yet, and I don't even know if it'll be the new Netflix interface when we do get it - Google TV is shipping with the old Netflix that only shows you your instant queue
• There's no Hulu Plus, but that doesn't bother me too much
• Vudu isn't there yet
• I'm hoping for a more traditional Youtube interface

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I think I'm going to have to readjust them...

Wow, that's disappointing. I'm sure some of the software limitations will get better over time, but the potential of hardware limitations is definitely a bummer. You knew they weren't going to outfit these devices with high-performance chips, but really, no background playback? My six year-old Linux box running Boxee could handle background playback.

It's starting to sound like the best option for many people is going to continue to be running a Mac Mini or small form-factor Linux box running Boxee. That's kinda sad.

And that's if the software for Boxee doesn't get f-ed up like it is. They are NOT going in the right direction here. They're clearly directing themselves at online video content, and I have big news for them: the content they're getting sucks. It just flat-out sucks.

The easiest thing to get to on the Box is the "all movies" list, which presents you with, as it claims, over 2000 films in one big alphabetical list. I checked out one or two of them, including "Big Buck Bunny." The animated short was kind of good, but not great, and when I selected it, I was actually taken to the web page that had the video on it. From there, I had to choose myself to display the video content in full screen, otherwise it was just playing in a little flash window in the middle of a full web page. So it took about 10 button presses just to watch one of these videos. That's a big failure in my book.

I'm thinking about it now, and really I think Boxee could address the majority of my complaints with one simple change: let me customize my home screen. At present, the home screen consists of five or so icons at the top, and three random videos at the bottom that I couldn't give a sh*t about and will never ever look at. The icons are the standard ones like "movies," which take you to a view like I mentioned above.

What if I could have something as simple as a customizable home screen where I could put a shortcut to places like "local Movies" and "local TV Shows," or apps like Youtube and Netflix (eventually)? That would make things much easier, and create a minimum number of button presses.

I've only tried Boxee with a 2007 Intel Mac Mini and it was connected to a PC monitor but it sounded like a jet engine trying to take off because of the excessive CPU load of Boxee.

Why is Boxee so exciting for you? Is it simply the online media capability? What does it offer (aside from that) over XBMC?

My last use of Boxee was very disappointing and not something I want to spend time sampling again just to see if it got better. However, I don't care about online media so much and everything I want to watch I have locally. Sure, it's only 250 bucks (or whatever) but if it's underpowered, well, you got what you paid for, right?

Ok, I'm feeling a little surly with all this news about Boxee hacking up their UI. Lately a lot of companies have been totally screwing the pooch. SageTV for instance took a good working, but somewhat outdated UI and came out with something that just looks terrible and amateurish (as well as being a copy of an XBMC skin). My spider-sense seems to have been on the money. I said it early on... Anyone who implements a media system that doesn't ignore articles simply doesn't have their eye on the ball.

A lot of people have been complaining that this reeks of a bait-and-switch, a slap in the face of everyone who has helped beta test the software on their Mac and PCs. They had millions of dollars of capital to put the software out and this is what they have to show for all the years of development. Maybe they heated their offices with a cash-burning stove.

XBMC looks like crap - every single skin looks terrible. Below terrible IMO. Besides, it runs only on large, power-hungry and !LOUD! boxes.

Boxee takes the XBMC core (all the open source libraries for codec, etc) and marries it to a metadata scraping engine to pull posters and descriptions, then it (used to) roll this all up in a very concise and usable UI.

Now it sounds like they're getting rid of their biggest strength, the UI. The metadata is useless without the UI, and the codec support is absolutely trivial to support elsewhere because it's open source and even if you wanted to or needed to build a non-open product, you have a nice selection of quite powerful integrated SoC to handle every HD resolution and codec you want to throw at a box.

I need a good system for playback and display of LOCAL TV shows and movies. Hopefully something to play back home movies at some point as well, but that's not of paramount importance right now. I don't really care at all about YouTube or any online content whatsoever, but it's a bonus I suppose. Yeah, I'm probably not the customer for Boxee.

If Boxee is as bad as Matt is describing it, I'm returning my units, sending a letter to Boxee to let them know why I returned them and I'll just go without. I'm not gong to dedicate any form of PC to this task, that's just too 1999. I'll remain a curmudgeon about this whole product class if I have to.

Putting Boxee on a Mac mini or any other machine isn't going to help in the long term because version 1.0 software will be coming to those versions as well. I mean, you can run the old interface if you're fine with a six month old beta.

The AppleTV hardware will completely wipe out the competition if it gets suitably hacked. Even though it doesn't currently support 1080p, with some decent mods it could be a lot better than anything else out there. I think it's going to sell more units than anything else even without any hacks or mods. It won't be iPod or iPhone nor iPad numbers, but they'll be higher than Boxee by at least a couple of orders of magnitude and they should be higher than Google's solution (from all supplier combined). Keep in mind that I think the stock Apple TV is crap, generally useless. I have no intention of ever buying or renting video from Apple, so that part (the biggest part of this product) doesn't appeal to me.

We mostly used our Apple TV for ripped content, though I suppose we do purchase/rent an non-insignificant amount of stuff from the Apple store.

I'd say our usage is:


75% DVD/Blu-Ray Rips
25% Purchased Content
05% Rentals

Our purchased content mostly comes in season passes for new shows as they come out- anything available on blu-ray or DVD we buy.

Of course, my wife re-watching owned content makes ownership a bigger value to us than to many others.

Its already been hacked. The AppleTV is just iOS but even more cut down. The only application on there is the "Frontrow" type application called Lowtide. People have transferred it on to other devices and it runs on there. Third party applications can already run on it as well just nobody has done much to support it.

I'm not sure where you're thinking these "decent" mods are though. People hacked the original Apple TV and that ran a cut down x86 OSX so porting was even easier but the additions were generally very clunky and not very good. If you thought Boxee was bad then look at some of the Apple TV 1st generation stuff :P

You can even run Boxee on the old Apple TV. Its just not very good because of the again high CPU consumption which makes the unit overhead and start crashing once you play video.

I'm very curious to see a boxeebox in action. I suppose I could see the (now) old UI by just downloading it. But the new UI has me curious. I really should visit Bruno someday!

Actually, I'm in Toronto this weekend, but carless. Typing this right now from a moving VIA Rail train.

MythTV-0.23, with the Mythbuntu "theme", and with my own "usability fixes", is rather good IMHO. Looks great onscreen, and works well enough. The SageTV UI confuses me, dunno why, but it does. Too chaotic or something. And that's despite me using MythTV for a few years now!

MythTV-0.24 just got released.. I suppose I'll update to get the bug fixes and the like.. this also means I'll have to forward port my usability patches to make it palatable again.

But at least I can do that.

Cheers

The old Apple TV didn't have much interest behind it. With iOS powering the current one it has a much larger pool of developers able to release code for it. It also means it will be trivial to port some existing apps to run on it - the biggest obstacle (IMO) is the user interaction/input.

if someone is going to try and write something from scratch targeting the hardware, they're going to fail. If someone writes a thin layer utilizing the existing video APIs, then they'll be in business.

Without any hacks the Apple TV will sell more units. With hacks it can make for a better system. Not saying necessarily that it will, but it can. The number of people willing to hack such a device is only a small percentage of total owners, but it could be close to the number of people willing to run the existing Boxee software. I'm almost tempted to include Boxee Box, but I think they'll get a good amount of new customers with that product. They won't do large scale (Apple, MS, etc..) volume by any stretch of the imagination however.

Oh, come now. I totally get that theme admiration is subject to personal opinion, but I'd hardly call this or this "below terrible". As for "Besides, it runs only on large, power-hungry and !LOUD! boxes", please stop spreading FUD and trolling just because you don't like something.

I run XBMC on an ASRock ION 330 which is hardly a power-hungry beast and is far from large. I doubt it's completely silent as it does have a fan inside, but I've never heard it. If you want, I can plug my Kill-a-Watt in and tell you exactly how much power it uses while decoding a 20+ GiB 1080p video.

XBMC comes with full support for metadata scraping including posters and fanart. It even has addons to play all TED talks, numerous other media streams (including YouTube, which I care less about than the TED talks) and if you don't see a scraper you like you're free to implement your own. Most of the addons have a less than ideal interface, but they're getting better.

It may not be perfect, but it works perfectly fine for me. Aside from my opinion about the themes, everything I've said here is based on provable facts. You are free to dislike it, but please don't spread falsehoods that will end up guiding people astray. You're very vocal and opinionated and I'm sure you'd hate to think someone made a decision based on bad information because of something you said.

What's the graphics performance like on that system? I've not seen or heard of XBMC running on any low-power system with acceptable performance. Decoding video is one thing, and as long as frames don't drop you're going to have a decent experience. But when the menu performance is slow, remote response disconnected, etc. it's going to make for a bad experience.

I hooked up Boxee last night and I have to say that this 1.0 release is, in terms of usability, an extremely early beta. Switching to a completely different UI right before shipping is far beyond a novice move and I have no idea how the money people let them do it. So much functionality has been removed from the previous betas and so many new bugs introduced (while old ones have not been addressed) that it's laughable - at least it would be if it didn't also make me want to cry.

Matt, I'm finding the easiest way to do anything is simply to go to the File option from the menu. You can also choose "files" from the Movies or "Shows" menu items, but that seems just redundant.

The "HOME" screen, is pretty useless as you've mentioned. And like in previous betas, it's not actually the top level menu. But it's even more painfully obvious because now the menu is actually a slide-down panel which is more like an options screen. Basically, the menu button on the remote takes you BACK in the UI, but only as far as media lists. Then you have to navigate the menu to go back any further. Poor implementation. Very easy to fix though.

I'm going to take back my second unit, but because I have a business case which requires access to this box, I'm going to hang on to the first unit and just keep my fingers crossed they see the light and add back all the functionality thet was lost - and more.

One of the things I mentioned about the last beta, the presence of actor's names in the movie descriptions, is also missing from 1.0. Actors are generally much more important to the synopsis than the director. I'm not even sure why they show director because you can't do anything with that information, like search for it or sort by it - same goes for year (we need to be able to sort by this). It's mainly just a point of trivia. You also can no longer scroll long movie descriptions.

The praise I can give is that FFWD/REW works a bit better. Still pretty bad, but a bit better.

Those Ion2 boxes have dual-core, dual-thread Atom processors, plus NVidia graphics for decoding/presenting video. I doubt there would be any unnecessary lag in the UI.

-ml

Yeah, but if we're talking about those ION 330 boxes, then we're talking about a completely different product. I know we've even discussed this exact thing before, Caleb, and you can't possibly be comparing a $430 computer to a $200 purpose-built device. And that's before you factor in the remote control (which isn't sold separately yet but will probably cost about $30.

I'm sure that computer is quite capable, even making for a decent desktop computer, let alone an HTPC that doesn't have to record video, but I'm looking for solutions that cost a lot less. I don't have approval from my wife to spend that much for this purpose

I'm going to have a lot to think about during my return window. I'm now researching the alternatives, and nothing is quite fitting the bill. I'll come back with my findings in a while.

31W at idle? Thats more then three times the most recent Mac Mini idle consumption. What are these companies doing to turn a supposedly power efficient and friendly CPU/chipset/GPU into a design that idles worse then a system much more powerful?

It would be interesting to compare power usage playing the same video file between your ASRock and a new Mac Mini. I however lack a new Mac Mini to test with. Maximum power draw for these two systems isn't a good comparison, since the Mini is a much more capable box, and of course a higher price to pay for the higher computing power.

*edit* Anandtech has even more power numbers. While some of the Mini's efficiency appears to come from OS X, even idle under Windows 7 is way lower then the ASRock.

I can currently buy a Zotac Atom 510 ("Ion2") box for $209 before rebates ($15 mail-in), a 1GB stick of DDR2 for $19, and a very large 2.5" drive for it for about $50.

So.. the modern price point for these roll-your-own XBMC / MythTV boxes is now about $300, before remote control. A good USB HDTV tuner for recording costs another $50 or so, but that's not an option at all for the closed boxes.

Getting there..

This is another reason to go with a purpose-built device. From what I'm finding on the web, the Apple TV draws about 1.7 to 2 watts. That's 2W while running Youtube or Netflix. I'm finding reviews that can't get the Roku above 7W.

I can't find stats for the Boxee Box, but I'd be surprised if it were more than a Mac Mini.

At the moment, the Roku looks really attractive, but it has nearly zero local media playback capabilities... ugh...

I expect those boxes use more power when actively playing HD content. That 1-2W figure has to be the standby or idle power.. still pretty good, though.

The Zotac box apparently idles at a whopping 21W -- I'll verify that later on. Picked one up today at the $210 price, and will send in the form to someday get $15 back (rebate).

I need a box that can RECORD content as well as play it back, so all of those nifty locked products just won't cut it. Nor will XBMC, as it too is a playback-only system.

I already have lots of leftover 1GB RAM sticks, and tons of SSDs and hard disks.. so for me this is a nicely versatile platform at a good price. My spare USB tuner will mate nicely into this system, with MythTV installed as a combined FE/BE.

Cheers

At most, the Apple TV will pull 5.95 watts based on the power supply it has. Keep in mind the Apple TV is basically an iPhone/iPad with an HDMI plug, no screen and no battery. The technology was made power efficient long ago, due to the need to cram it in someones pocket for daily use.

If you turn it off, it loses all its indexed cover art. So the next time you turn it on to watch a movie, you'd better plan in advance and do so at least 30 minutes before you actually want to watch anything or you'll be looking only at black rectangles as you navigate.

Sorry, but I haven't seen that happen on my end.

I voiced a few of my complaints on Twitter in hopes that I'd get Boxee's attention. For some reason Twitter is the only place companies go these days to communicate with their customers, even though it's a terrible way to communicate.

Anyway, the founder actually responded to me and asked for an email with my list of complaints. He also said they're working on addressing the navigation to the local media, so it sounds like they're listening.

The primary suggestion I made in my email to them is one that I feel would be easy to implement, work pretty well, and even use a system they have in place already: favorites.

I suggested that they change the home screen on the device to show favorites, and open favorites up to more aspects of the device. For instance, let me favorite an area like the local movies, or a TV show. Then just have those favorites auto-populate the home screen. It would make for a much more useful screen than they have now.

The only other suggestion I made is related to the first one: make the menu button back all the way out to the home screen. I explained how silly it was that the "home" screen is rarely seen other than when you first power on the box.

When a device/product maker starts taking direct suggestions from customers it leaves me worried. It means they don't have the vision to create a refined product. I suppose this can be mitigated depending on how a company acts on the suggestions, but Boxee hasn't shown that they can turn something around quickly nor distill these suggestions. This can lead to some hairy implementation that simply tried to cater to too many tastes and ends up pleasing no one.

We'll see. I've factory reset the box back to version 0.9, but now I'm once again having issues entering my login credentials. No time to continue testing today, so I'll give this another look tomorrow. If I can't recommend the product to friends, then I can't very well include it in my business plans either. I'm in a bit of a quandary right now.

A startling sentiment to read on what is, after all, the Empeg BBS!

Peter

Well, they're already pleasing no one, so why not take suggestions? I don't have any problem with companies listening to their users. It's the ones that don't that annoy me to no end. Hell, I've tried tirelessly to get somebody at Google to listen to me about an Android bug that users are complaining about, but like most corporations their size, they've completely shut themselves off from their users. I like small companies that hear when they're doing something wrong.

I get what you're saying about their lack of vision, but what one person might call vision and direction, another could call stubbornness. I'm pleased that they're flexible.

Well to be fair you guys were perfectly happy to ignore us customers when you knew we were wrong. After all we wouldn't have end up with the striking Mk2 fascia if you had listened to most of us customer

Taking suggestions from end users is ok, as long as the company isn't using feedback as the only, or majority portion of how to shape and change the product. I was able to see first hand the dangers of both never listening to customers, and listening too much when it comes to game development. If you only end up listening to the vocal customers, you end up with Everquest's problem, where expansion after expansion ended up catering only to a small percentage of the actual subscriber base. If you don't listen at all, and decide to just change the entire product without warning, you end up with Star Wars Galaxies problems during the NGE. Based on these past blunders, SOE is a very different company today, ensuring time is spent making better games by using a number of different methods to create and improve them.

Ultimately feedback from end users should be a small part of the overall plan, as it's hard to gauge sometimes what percentage of your user base actually agrees with what is needed. Temper it with actual proper metrics to know how end users are actually using the product, and a vision that helps ensure it remains accessible to the potential future customers too. And ensure that new ideas are also coming from internal development, since sometimes users don't know what they want until after you've put a feature into the product. You also have to decide what you want your market to be and focus on it, instead of always trying to appeal to everyone. Sony and Microsoft are potentially making some dangerous moves these days, trying to connect with the success Nintendo had with motion controls. If they don't ensure their core base is also kept happy, they may end up trading one type of user for another.

Apple, IMO is the perfect (current) example of a company that listens, but doesn't let users/fans design their products. The people working within Apple have vision and execute it very well.

The Boxee design is frankly all over the map. I feel doubly like a fool because I first championed the WDTVLive box and then the Boxee. Now both are coming up short. At least with the WDTVLive it was an entry-level solution with an entry-level price. Boxee is very steep for the current level of polish. If they expect the users to design and test, the boxes should at least be free as compensation. Obviously that would never happen, but I thought I'd just put the ridiculousness of the current situation into perspective.

You're joking, right? Is this a troll? Can you name any concrete examples of Apple listening to its customers? I have to think that if they were listening right now, for example, they'd at least be considering an option for a screen rotation lock on the iPad, instead of touting it as a feature at launch, getting rid of it because Steve says so, and then refusing to even consider making it an option.

Apple is most certainly NOT a good example of a company that listens to its users. It's probably one of the most extreme examples of a corporation with an auteur at the head who makes every decision, rarely if ever taking the users' requests into consideration.

Don't get me wrong, that way works better for them than any other company, purely because Steve is almost always correct in his decisions as being right for the company, and frequently for their users, but again, I get no sense that they're taking user feedback to heart.

The iPad retains the screen rotation lock in 4.2, it's just changed to mirror the way it was implemented on the iPhone when 4.0 came out.

If you want a concrete example of Apple listening to it's users, look at their products. Not many users indicated their interest in the XServe, so it's going away. That may seem bad (and it definitely is for the few groups of people that depended on the system), but it allows Apple to put those resources elsewhere, instead of keeping a near dead product alive and potentially driving up costs elsewhere. There is also the generation of iPod with the weird 4 buttons above the scroll wheel. They received feedback that people generally didn't like that and the generation after was changed back with the click wheel. Some of their pro users indicated a strong liking for non glossy screens, so the 15 and 17 inch systems offer a non glossy option. Those are three examples I can think of, there are probably many more others could point out.

I've submitted, and had feedback responded to regarding Apple's products, so I even have personal experiences to know they do listen. Jobs just happens to be user #1 with a very big override on other feedback. BluRay is sadly one of those frustrating areas where he is overriding my own feedback.

Below are ways I know of to submit feedback to Apple, and at least have it read. It may not be considered or acted upon, but thats most likely the case for many other companies too.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/
https://bugreport.apple.com/

Isn't that just good business instead of appearing to listen to your users? The rest I agree with tho :P

Not buying something can a form of user feedback, when they are choosing to vote with their wallet. I'm sure Apple had feedback asking for a cheeper server then the XServe or OS X server on a Mac Pro. So they released the Mini server, and in doing so, users voted with their wallet indicating they liked the Mini over the other choices. I've seen companies I've worked for in the past keep products alive well past financial feasibility for the business, either in an attempt to and remarket the product to try and pull more people in, or as a way to hopefully keep existing small customer base happy.

I have to agree with Trevor. I hardly see it as "listening to customer feedback" when you cancel a product line due to poor sales. I know that's one form of feedback, but it's really the most basic, and what company doesn't listen to that particular form of feedback? I'm not going to give Apple any credit for that one

Now that I think about it, a better example would be the return of buttons on the shuffle. I don't know any sales numbers, but I suspect they had something to do with that as well.


Are you talking about the physical switch on the side? Because I was under the impression that it was being changed back to a mute button. If that's what you mean, I don't think I'd be a very happy iPad customer. I get the whole "consistent experience" thing, but like I said, why not give people the option?

Besides, how often do you need a hardware mute button on your iPad? I know for certain that if I had one, my answer would be "a tiny fraction of the number of times I turn in bed while reading"

But hey, I might have been following the story incorrectly. Please let me know if I'm wrong.

To be honest, we wouldn't have ended up with the Mk2 fascia if Rob had listened to the rest of empeg In fact, we didn't see it until it was a fait-accompli. And I honestly think it's better for that. Thanks Rob.

Apples track history of listening on the iPhone is, for lack of a better phrase, piss poor and even if they do listen, it takes years to "make it through the machine". I'm still anxiously awaiting a lock screen which allows you to see information, upcoming appointments, number of emails and whatever information third party apps want to disclose via some method of configuration.

I'm not holding my breath.

I also fail to see the x-serve analogy.

Info on lock screen: LockInfo running with Winterboard after Jailbeak. Do it. Then apply a decent skin to the lock screen. Then also install SBSettings. Invaluable.

I said Apple was the perfect example and I'll argue this until the end of time with anyone. I can argue the opposite as well, but I actually believe what I've said, so I'm sticking with this position.

They "listen" but they don't always react the way you may want them to. Believe me, I'll be extremely vocal about this as well, because of my passion for the platform and design. There's a lot to complain about Apple's products. So in listening, they execute a balanced effort that for the past 10 years has achieved extremely wide product acceptance like they have never before seen in their history. And wide and long enough that they have completely obliterated the competition in these few categories.

Now, if they wanted to better design many of their products they could give me a call and I'd help them out, but I'm hardly delusional enough that it would ever happen.

Market prognostication time (responding to some stuff on the first page of this thead):

AppleTV has a major advantage, solely for its $99 price point. Hell, they even reduced the physical size to the point that it can literally be a Christmas stocking stuffer. Given the surprising uptake of Netflix downloads, and the fact that the 2nd-gen AppleTV supports them out of the box, that makes for a killer combination. It's easy, all too easy, to see Apple enabling third-party apps, which will bring in Pandora and all the other missing stuff without people needing to hack the box.

I'd been running Boxee on my 1st-gen AppleTV (before it overheated and crapped out), but Pandora was our #1 application for it. These days, Pandora is showing up on all kinds of other platforms, including our new Tivo Premiere (which replaced the Tivo HD that self-destructed).

Given that Tivo is keeping Pandora up, that's just enough that I'm not racing out to buy anything new. Maybe I'll try out Netflix at some point, and Tivo supports that as well. Of course, Tivo has plenty of failings (including very poor support for streaming videos from my computer), but I don't want to buy more random home theater electronics until there's real support for them, versus all this "sorry, only on your PC" filtering bull.

I agree with everything you said, but everything you said also applies to Roku, and the model that corresponds to Apple TV's features is the $60 model. Plus:


I know it's not the same, but Roku already has a channel app ecosystem, and people are writing channels for it themselves.

I've already had people ask me about these kinds of products, and I've been giving the same advice to all of them: if you're a heavy iTunes user, I say go with the Apple TV. If not, you might as well go with Roku, which can do much more for less money. Seriously, $99 is great and all, but at $59, I can see people simply getting one for every TV in the house!

As dissatisfied as I am with the Boxee Box in its current state, I've come to a tough conclusion: it's the only solution out there for me.

The Roku, quite simply, DOES NOT do local media playback. They talk about it on their high-end model, but it isn't even implemented yet, and from everything I can tell, it'll only work using sneakernet, and that's simply not acceptable these days. Other than that, the Roku is everything else that I want out of this product category...

The Apple TV is very attractive, but it requires me to encode all the video I'm going to want to watch on it, and I don't want to be forced to run software on my computer (iTunes) in order to use a device like this.

So that leaves me with the Boxee Box. I'm going to tough it out and see if they can improve the software. Really, all I'm waiting for at this point is the Netflix app, and then I'll be fairly happy with the thing.

Sadly quite a few. I saw Compaq spend way too much time in engineering working on a few specific new server models customers didn't want, then putting them on sale, and most likely ending up wasting a lot of money when they didn't sell. Same for keeping some product lines running well past when users wanted them. I've seen software companies do the same, implementing some feature or change users didn't want, but some exec did. It's sadly more common then you may think. With Apple, even Jobs tends to keep a grounded user approach to products and decisions. His decisions may not always line up with all the users, or even a majority, but he's usually quick to correct himself when needed. Plenty of other heads of companies have similar powers over design and products, without the grounding into what the consumer actually wanted.


No, I'm talking about the overall option. Your initial statement came across to me as if the entire thing had been removed because Jobs said so. It wasn't. When the iPad was first shown, the physical switch was a mute switch. Then, shortly before launch, it changed to be a screen rotation lock, likely due to Apple knowing it would be useful, but without an easy way to implement it in software quickly before ship. iOS 4.0 was well in development while 3.2 (iPad only iOS release) was locked down and being prepared for shipment. Changing the switch behavior is trivial code compared to implementing some sort of universally accessible software option in an iOS release not built for multitasking. iOS 4.0 then gained the rotation lock as an option under the new multitasking/quick options bar and was added to the iPhone. Fast forward to 4.2 when the iPad is finally brought into the 4.x line, and the option remains in the same place in the quick options panel.


I know for certain (due to owning one :-P) that I need a mute switch 2 times daily. Once for when I go into the office, and don't want the iPad going "ping" every time I get an e-mail or meeting reminder, and once when I get home and want to resume my previous Netflix video before bed. Due to my iPad being secured with a PIN lock, I currently have to open my case, unlock the device, then hold down the volume down button to mute it. With 4.2, it will be a switch accessible without even opening the case, just like my iPhone. Rotation lock? I need access to that much less frequently, and every time I need it, the device will be on and in use. Thus, a software only option works just fine.

In terms of app ecosystems and whatnot, I'm curious whether this notion of HTML5 channels (being pushed variously by Boxee and Google) will take off. Certainly, Apple *could* support it, or they might instead push for an Apple-lock-in native app model.

Now if only Tivo would jump into this mix in a useful way...

If TiVo jumped in they'd only have more boxes that no one would buy, using a 10 year old interface.

As far as Roku having this or that and a price point. It doesn't matter. Roku doesn't have a name. No one except some random geek is going to buy a Roku when it's sitting next to an AppleTV at the same price point. If it was half the price of the Apple TV then it would get some additional sales from people who are very frugal. In every case, investing money in the Roku solution is throwing money away. Might as well just put it in an envelope and send it to me, I'll put it to better use. Roku has only a poor track record for supporting its products and a fantastic track record for abandoning its products.

Yes, Boxee may be the best of the worst. That doesn't make me happy about it. The current software is lacking.

*I wrote a really long post, but through it out for brevity*

Tom, sorry, but you misconstrued my comments. I was merely using a shorthand to refer to the "screen orientation issue," never did I claim they eliminated the feature.

I know you use your iPad at work, but I maintain that you're in the minority, and most people don't need a dedicated mute switch on the iPad, and for a large number of the people who do, I'd be willing to bet that holding the volume down is enough. At the very least, it sounds like an easier procedure than the one to change the orientation, particularly considering the people who use it probably need it more often than you need the mute.

But do you know what would make this entire discussion moot? One simple little option in settings. I will always be a staunch supporter of options.

Anyway, this has really gotten off topic, so I'm going to create a separate post (post, not thread) to talk about Boxee and settop boxes some more. I'm really tired of talking about Apple, and swore I wouldn't get dragged or drag myself into it again, so I give up. You guys win, Apple is always right.

(ps- I'm not saying they don't always have the best product, though. clearly the iPad is [still] better than the competition)

Bruno, I know you said you didn't always like when companies listened to users, but I can't help but applaud Boxee.

Today I received a personal response from Avner Ronen (Boxee founder), addressing the very long email I sent him point by point! He listened to every single part of my email and CC'd two other people, calling to them at several points to work with me on bugs I'd found (like the flickering line and freezing in the photo mode). That's pretty freaking awesome. I'll attempt to list some of the things he said, most of which were very encouraging and might have made up my mind to keep the Box:

• On the difficulty in navigating to local media: "We hear many complaints about it. going to address it. basically enable someone that uses Boxee predominantly for local file playback to make Boxee respect that and when you click Movies, take you to your local movies, etc."
• On the changes to the interface in general from beta: "1.0 is a big change from the Beta, and I believe we'll make more drastic changes down the road. We need to be better in communicating it to users, but we still think there is lots to do in order to make Boxee compete for input 1 on TVs for most users." I'm glad he knows they didn't communicate the transition well.
• "we are going to bring back the sort orders and reverse sort-orders. just not as part of a left menubar, but rather as a button on top."
• On the movie poster thumbnails: "yes it does not cache the thumbs between reboots. we're going to fix it."
• In response to my suggestion that the home screen be made up of favorited items from around the Box: "that's a good idea. we toyed with it in the past without much success. but i hear you."
• Lastly, he even addressed a really silly bug. See, I have a backup of "Batteries Not Included" in my movie folder. The actual title of the movie, though, is "*Batteries Not included," but because Windows won't let me put an asterix in the file name, when Boxee goes out to find that title, it instead finds the alternative title to "Child's Play," which is of course a very different movie

Anyway, I understand your thoughts, Bruno, and agree that the software on the Boxee Box was just not ready. But this email gave me a decent amount of confidence that they might be on the right track.

It's at least something.

Woah. I said that I didn't like it when companies let users DESIGN their products and use customers as a replacement for lack of vision on their part.

Every company should be responsive to users and I'd argue that what Avner did with your email and has been doing with many others, is good PR to try and put out a flaming storm that has landed since the Box's release. I still think the top-mounted options pales in comparison to the left-side implementation they had before.

Did you happen to mention anything about only showing 8 covers in the new UI? Not being able to mark shows/movies as watched? Being able to filter on watched, etc..

Oh, you'd love TiVo's new "HD" user interface. The main bug is that it's remarkably sluggish. A secondary bug is that it doesn't handle the arrow-keys in a transparent way to how the classic interface works. And, naturally, several of the newer features, such as the Pandora support, are only available on the HD user interface.

Assuming TiVo got some competent staff, I imagine there's plenty of horsepower inside the new machines to pull off a very nice HD user interface.

Yep, just like you misconstrued Bruno's comments too. But hey, I'm wrong, he's wrong, and whatever.

You know what. Screw this. Every time I try to explain something from a different point of view, one that at least tries to show the thought process that probably goes on at Apple, I drive people away from the discussion. Ok, fine. I get the hint.

So yeah. I give up too.

This is probably just the result of a lot of stress I have currently from moving to a new city where I don't know anyone, changing jobs, and so on. So to avoid pissing anyone else off here for now, and for the good of the community, I'm going to take a leave for a while. Admins have my cell phone number if they need to reach me if the server craps out. They also know the procedures for approving new users. It's in their hands now. I'll be back one day.

Tom, don't leave because of a stupid disagreement about the switch on the side of a computing device. Sorry to hear you're stressed and everything, but stick around the board. At least you know people here.

I'll send you a PM.

I won't. Every option doubles the amount of testing to be done and increases training and support costs. Every time we, as software developers, think "I can't decide which is better; I'll let the user decide", we've messed up.

I used to think this was nonsense, until I saw my first iPhone. Now I wholehearted agree (though I think there are still some classes of highly technical software were more options are still good).

This is so true. I have said for a long time that most development teams do not properly measure the complexity cost of adding a single checkbox.

Okay, I can see that from a programmer's point of view. But for a user, especially here, I think a number of people would say "okay, you changed it, but why can't I choose to change it back?"

Because it's double the amount of testing. The correct choice would have been not to change it and leave it as an orientation lock. Having an option in settings somewhere is just nonsense.

If you want it bad enough and don't want Apple to test for it (we're talking about Apple, not Boxee on this one right?) then I'm sure someone will release a Jailbreak-only patch for it someday.

With regards to Boxee, they too should not have changed over their UI completely and instead focused on actually fixing the problems and bugs with the previous UI. Now they have a brand new mess to deal with and have to try and hack back support for features that already existed in the old version into a framework and concept that likely was never designed to accept them in the first place.

It's not just from the development point of view- it' also (mainly, IMO) a usability issue. Every option adds complexity to the user experience- sometimes it's worth it because the flexibility is worth it, but often it is not. You and I probably represent the user base that can deal relatively easily with the complexity added by options- but the majority of users will be confused and overwhelmed fairly easily. I learned this lesson much earlier in my career when developing for a wide user base. It's a bit maddening, but often delivering a clear, consise pathway through the product trumps functionality.

Now this isn't true for products with a user base of more technically minded people- so a product like Visual Studio benefits from flexibility, but something like the iPad is marketed toward a broader base and many of its users are going to be frustrated and confused by options that are not necessary. They don't want to think about how to mute, they just want to know how to do it with their device. Note that I dont have an opinion on that specific example- just making a broader point about software development.

It's easy enough to hide options from the casual user yet present them to people who go searching.

True, but every option has to be QA'd. More options equals more QA resources needed, or less QA attention per feature.

Using the Apple example again: How would an non-techy react if on one iPad the switch locked orientation and on another it muted the device? Where would they find the setting? Would they even think to themselves that a setting must exist?

This is the reason the option was changed to mute - to match the iPhone. IMO, the devices are different enough where I think it could have been left the way it was however. I do think there should not be a setting to modify the hardware button though.

I'm interested to see how the mute switch actually works on the iPad.

On iOS 3.x on the iPad holding down the down volume rocker mutes. It mutes all the audio.

On iOS on the iPhone the mute switch only mutes notifications, ringing etc To mute the whole audio you need to turn the volume all the way down.

What will the mute switch on iOS 4.2 actually mute on the iPad ? Will holding down the down rocker on the iPad still mute all the audio ? Will holding down the rocker on the iPhone how be a quick way to mute all audio ?

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.

No thanks. If you're both going to the effort of discussing this stuff, you may as well make the discussion available for others to read -- contributing to the communal knowledge base and all of that.

Most of us can ignore it all if we're not interested.

Ditto.
You've helped me defer purchasing one for now.

Matt, have I ever sent you one of the IR receivers I sell? It's supposed to work with the Boxee Box, but I haven't had the chance yet to test with the release firmware - I'm in the middle of a bit of renovation and can't set up the video switcher right now.

What Phoenix42 said. Whilst I may not have a D-Link Boxee box, it is good to know that its not quite 100% yet and needs some more work.

Okay, thanks guys, I just wanted to make sure. And it's not 100% to say the least, but the large batch of improvements and bug fixes only 25 days after release gives me some confidence in the product.

Bruno, I do have one of your receivers, but I'm not certain where it is at the moment. I'll have to go digging for it because I'd like to try that out. I don't mind using the Boxee remote because of the keyboard, but it might be nice to program some controls into my Pronto. Any idea what codes I'd use, though?

Also, I was able to find the discussions about the .tbn format, but have one question: how do I make them? Do I just get a .jpg and change the extension? Is it a different format entirely? I gather that the .tbn comes from hacking the original XBox to show different thumbnails, and probably carried through XBMC to Boxee, but I wish they'd just let you save jpegs. It would be much simpler to just have a "folder.jpg" file and, say, a "movie title.jpg" file for each movie. I'm not sure why .tbn is necessary. And given how hard it is to search for a tool that makes these files (I keep getting Trinity Broadcasting Network), it's a difficult thing to figure out...

The thread I saw just mentioned renaming a jpeg to .tbn - it was for use when you had multiple movies within the same folder. If you keep your movies in their own folder (I do this) then the folder.jpg should be all you need.

I'm going to check my email for your address and I'll send you another receiver - this one is from a newer batch and has PCB/component differences. I can't remember when I sent you the one you have now so I can't recall if it's a "2005" or a Vista/7 class model.

The Box should recognize "MCE2" codes - that's what Boxee calls them. They should be Vista/7 class MCE codes which I'm not actually certain differ from the 2005 and previous codes. I do know it's the same codes the XBOX apparently responds to. There are actually multiple code IDs for MCE, but I don't think there's a way to tell Boxee which ID to listen to, nor how to tell XBOX the same thing. So for people with multiple devices it may be problematic without the use of an IR repeater and blaster system, plus hiding the receivers so they don't themselves pick up the IR from a remote directly. Hopefully Boxee will create their own codes - something I want to talk to them about.

BTW, have you been emailing Avner at the general email address or his own personal address? I should write to him directly about this.

I can't seem to find your address in email, and you may have moved since then anyway, so send me your current mailing address. You can email me by using my first name at my company domain.

Ah, so does the .tbn only provide an image for the whole folder, and not each individual file? I really wish they'd let us override the image they download...

?? Nonono. What I've read in the forum indicated that moviename.tbn will override the cover art for the movie when it's stored next to other movies. folder.jpg will do it for the movie only when that movie is the only one within that folder. At least that's what was written by the people in the thread I saw.

Ah, I see.

Update: as much good faith that the update gave me, they lost right back again. My favorite element of the update was that subtitles would be off by default now. I mean, I was baffled as to why they would be on by default originally, but at least they fixed it...

...except nothing is different. After applying the update, I went and played a video and was presented with subtitles. I could turn them off for that video while it was playing just like I had to do for each video before. I thought "okay, maybe there's a master setting that just received the wrong toggle when they made the fix." So I went to settings, and there's an option under "subtitles" that says something like "enable subtitles by default" and it was unchecked. This is where I started getting discouraged. I changed nothing and went to play several movie files. All that had subtitles showed them to me, and when I went into the video setting (the one you reach while the video was playing), there was a check mark next to "show subtitles" or whatever it's called.

So I went back to the master setting and tried toggling it to the other setting, the one that should give me the opposite of what I want. Well, I got the exact same result. The setting appears to not do anything at all! I tried flipping it two more times and it never did anything.

Like I said, this is discouraging. I so want to believe that they're listening and making corrections, but it just really doesn't look like they're doing things well here...

Hmm... Is it because it is you already imported video and therefore it has already picked up that subtitles setting from when it was enabled by default?

It's possible, but that would still be a really stupid way of doing things. I think most users would assume that the setting is a playback issue, not something that gets applied to each video.

Also, it's not something you can turn on or off for each video independently. Before the update, if I played a video, turned off the subtitles, stopped the video, then played it again, selecting to start from the beginning (a sort of reset), I would have to turn the subtitles off again. I still have to do this after the update. The device seems to want to force the subtitles on me!

Well, Trevor, it appears you were correct. It seems ridiculous that it was a per-video setting, especially since it was a setting that wouldn't stick, but from what other people were saying on the forums, if you had played a video with subtitles before the update, it would still show the subtitles after the update.

To simplify everything, I just removed the folder and added it again. Now it works as it should.

That's ridiculous. Unfortunately all the media code is based on XBMC and the UI design was farmed out to a design firm. Could be why a lot of what's in there now seems tacked on. This is still fixable, but I haven't seen indication yet to show me where they're going with it. I have plenty of ideas myself on how to remedy the situation for pretty much all user camps.

Eww. It sounds like its designed by programmers for other programmers to use. The way they've done it is admittedly more flexible but not actually what you need or want for nearly all cases. It would have been okay if they hadn't made the mistake of forcing that setting on originally and also compounded it by somehow screwing up the DB which prevented you from toggling the setting afterwards.

Don't get me wrong, they do get a lot right, but it's the attention to detail they really miss out on. A lot of little things, that when compounded start to weight very heavy.

As both Matt and I have mentioned before, it's still the best thing out there, but it's a shame it just doesn't hit that last 10% of fit and finish.

I agree with that statement 100%.

I'd add that they at least seem to be addressing the bugs and complaints they receive, so it seems they're improving.

It's not clear to me (without rereading zillions of posts here) how this actually works. But the way I want it to work, is to have the subtitles on/off setting remembered on a per-video (file) basis.

When I watch a great Italian film, I want the subtitles every time I play it. But not so for English or (most) French videos. The ideal interface would remember my viewing preference per-video.

Cheers

I wouldn't mind that, but the difference here was that previously there was no setting, the player just decided to have subtitles on by default for every video. Once you started playing a video, you could go into the menu that lets you choose between the various audio tracks and things like that, and turn the subtitles off. After that, you could leave the video and do other things. When you came back to the video, it gave you a choice to resume from where you left off, or restart it. Resuming saved everything about the video from before, such as the audio track selected and your subtitle preference. Restarting started the video fresh from the defaults, which used to be subtitles enabled. This is what was annoying. I don't ever need to watch my backup of Shawshank Redemption with subtitles.

After the update, however, the default in the settings was to have subtitles disabled by default (what I wanted), but any video that I had watched at any point before the update appeared to have the subtitles enabled by default, whether I was resuming them or starting from the beginning.

Naturally, this will no longer be a problem for anyone who buys the Box today, but I worry that it shows something about the company. Did they not try this out themselves? Were they testing on fresh boxes with no video carrying over?

The solution was very simple: just remove the directory from the file sources and re-add it.


Bruno, thanks for the tip about the .tbn files. It really was as easy as saving a jpg of the cover art and renaming the extension to .tbn. Now I have far better cover art for some of the movies.

I really don't know how it goes about choosing the art for some of this stuff. Take, for example, Highlander. The cover art it chose is below.

I ran a Google image search for "Highlander," and scrolled through at least five pages and couldn't find it. I had to narrow the search to black and white images. That art doesn't appear on IMDb, and it doesn't exactly show up on Amazon (there's an angled view of it). I don't know what made their algorithm choose that image over the dozens of others I ran across...

That seems to be common mindset across many software vendors. The response I've gotten when I had a chance to ask, was sort of, a would you rather us fix the trivial problems or create new functionality.

My translation- "Hunting down and fixing "trivial" bugs is boring and frustrating, writing new stuff is fun and exciting."

I'd rather you not write functionality you don't intend to function properly. So yeah, fix the "trivial" problems.

Now if it's between "major" and "trivial" problems, then fix the "major" ones first. Bug hopefully, your "trivial" problems are trivial to fix. If they aren't, start designing better software, and for goodness sake, don't create new functionality when you can't even fix the old stuff.

Some companies just don't have the capital to sit on their product with no sales while they spend the 50% of the time that it takes to do that last 10% of fit and finish, even if they want to. Sometimes it's just simple economics that dictate that they release early and often as they get things fixed/polished so they can have a revenue stream.

But then as Jeff said, stop adding new features and focus on your core functionality.

Boxee has been free and available (out) for a few years though. And for the release of the "Box" they changed their complete UI. They don't exactly fit the typical model.

I believe software is organic and it's never truly finished, however, there needs to be a certain amount of content and sense of completeness to a version 1.0 - with the last minute changes Boxee really threw out the baby with the bathwater as they say.

And for me, with a product featuring a UI that used to be very focused on media/library presentation, not filtering articles is a pretty big omission. That would be one of the first things I'd have up and running simply as part of doing a basic alphabetic sort.

I know all about this- as right now we are about to ship a product that is FAR short on the functionality we were supposed to deliver (un-realistic expectations, I'm afraid). However, what's in there works, and if there are bugs (I'm certain there will be) we will fix them and they will not be difficult to fix.

Having that 10% hanging out there in front of the customer can destroy the credibility the 90% that works correctly has earned. Every time we develop a feature, we make sure all known outstanding bugs are fixed before considering it "done". I think this is important, because in my experience that last 10% often ends up being the last 90%, but you don't know it until you try to make it work. I can't count the number of times I've heard "I've just got one more thing and I'm done with this"- and then I keep hearing about problems encountered for the next two week.

Ok, I'm just starting to use Boxee, but how do you tag a video when Boxee can't find it in IMDB? My 22 mo. old daughter likes to watch Dora the Explorer, but the videos don't come up in IMDB. I've got them all tagged properly in iTunes, but that seems to make no difference at all. They all just show up in Boxee as "missing identity"

Officially: That's one of the problems Matt and I have discussed - you don't. With the current UI/functionality they will always be unidentified and you'll need to browse files to see/reach them.

Unofficially: If you're using Boxee on a computer system, you can use a third-party program to manipulate Boxee's DB and create or modify entries. There should be numerous discussions in the Boxee forums about a few ways to do this.

Ok...so if I name them in the "proper" format, they go into the library. Unfortunately, as soon as I change some data in iTunes, it then renames them and they're gone from Boxee again. I know I don't have to let iTunes manage my folders, but I would like to for some strange unknown reason.

Interesting. How does iTunes name them? Back when I first tried Boxee on my Windows machine, I thought I was having trouble getting the file name right, but actually Boxee has been surprisingly lenient on naming methodology lately. For the most part for TV shows as long as the name of the show is in the file and the episode number (in several different formats), it understands. For movies, as long as there are no duplicate titles it'll get the correct data with just the name of the movie.

That's actually one area I don't have any complaints about

Oh, did I mention yet that requiring a username (registration in general) to use Boxee is infuriating? And when using the Box (for the first time) it's just a painful exercise in frustration. Though switching users is also a bit of a PITA. Too bad, because if you have a kid in the house it would be nice to be able to have a different local library defined for them.

The biggest PITA is that you can't use whatever name you want either. I mean, it's my box. Why does Boxee have to check with the server to see if anyone else is using the name I want to use? They already have your email address as the primary differentiating piece of information. Why can't there by two "Smiths?" When implementing a community, don't key off the user name.

So now for my own private box I have to have a user name with a number in it. So if I want to have multiple user names for people in the house, instead of having "Bruno" and "Erin" and "Olivia" I have to have something like "Bruno8736" "Erin47343" and "Olivia3221" - shortsighted.

There's a firmware update due next week (that's two in less than a month, which I like).

It looks like the primary focus of this update is, thankfully, on local media issues. To start, you get an option to tell the Box what you use it for. I don't know if this is the best way to do this (it adds yet another option to the setup, for one thing), but it's better. It'll be much faster to get to the areas I want.

Also included is the ability to sort videos, jumping through movies by alphabet, marking as (un)watched, and an option for hourly source scanning.

Unfortunately you have to log into the forums to see the images, but they don't add a whole lot of information.

I'm looking forward to this, primarily because it will greatly reduce the button presses on my remote to get to my local media. The fact that they've implemented fixes requested by their users in under a month impresses me.

Are they caching the cover art in this release? That's probably oddest thing missing from 1.0 (which was in the betas) since it doesn't involve the UI.

I just took a look at the link you posted and I'm a little disappointed to still see a "files" entry under the Movies main entry. Unless of course that screen shot is while running in the current "online preferred" mode. One would hope that if you set Local as the preference, the options at the left side (beginning) of the sub-menu would be local playback related and wouldn't use the word "files". I wouldn't mind, and wold actually prefer, if the online/internet stuff were more clearly labeled instead.

Anyway, happy to have the changes, but it's still very obvious that this UI was quickly put together and now they're scrambling to make it work to address customer complaints. Could be a bumpy road ahead with a lot of beta firmware drops.

No idea, guess we'll see.


I don't think I'll mind that. After all (and I'm not at my home theater so I can't confirm this), the way it is now, can't you click on "Movies" in the drop-down without going to the sub-options? It brings them up, but if you just click on "Movies" or "TV Shows," it takes you right to the "All" screen. I gather that with this change, it would take you right to your own files. That sounds fine to me.


Yeah, I'm kinda worried about that too...

I've read some speculation in the forums that the changes with 1.0, basically abandoning the previous UI, were motivated by Dlink. SO this may be a case of the Boxee guys scrambling to try and put back whatever past functionality they previously had while struggling with the Dlink relationship. No idea if that's even remotely true.

do recall from CES that there was supposed to be another product featuring Boxee on-board, but I haven't heard anything about it since that time. I'm not sure if any other moderately significant players would be interested in deploying a Boxee-powered product. What would the differentiator be? Especially since this product is already positioned in large part as a Boxee product ("Boxee Box" name and all).

If you ant to see something rather simple presented in convoluted fashion, look at the screenshot showing the revision to the library scanning frequency. Even the title of the option needs work/clarity, never mind they have at least one, but more like two options too many to choose from.

I would be a bit shocked if this were true. I don't think I'd listen much to the users on those forums. If it were true, though, the thought of D-Link dictating interface design is one of the most hilarious things I've heard this month. They make okay inexpensive consumer hardware, but every D-Link UI I've seen is hideous. Their router config screens have always been a mess, even more than Linksys.


I'm not sure what the shock here is. It looks identical to the current screen, but with the "hourly" option on it. Have you not seen that screen before? And how is 4 options too many? They give you the following source scan frequencies:

• Never - you want to add the source, but not have it show up in your metadata-tagged library. You could still browse to it somewhat quickly
• Once - if you don't plan on making changes to a source, why make the Box keep scanning it?
• Daily
• Hourly

As for the last two, it's just down to the frequency at which items are added to the sources. Lets say you have a Bittorrent RSS feed set up, so that items get downloaded and added to the source all automatically. I'll give you that the daily scan is probably not needed, but some people might want it.

For me, the daily scan isn't great, but others might find it useful. Really, I just wish it would scan based on something the user did, like going to browse your local files. I'd love to know how much work the Box has to do to scan the files. Apparently running scans are halted whenever you start playing video, so I guess the Box doesn't have enough overheard to do both tasks at the same time...

Ok, first, they call it scan "types" which is kind of lame for both people who are technical and those who are not.

They have always had four options in the betas. That "hourly" is not new, it's just new to 1.0 and the title "hourly" itself is new. At some point you have to stop adding convoluted options, and IMO, those four aren't all needed. Someone will ask for options for 5 hours, 2 hours, every three days, etc.

The Never and Once items for instance will do the same thing on an ongoing basis. The only difference is at the point you make the addition. Ok, remove the once option and just do a manual scan when you first add it. The "once" option doesn't make any sense on a persistent setting - when is that "once?" What happens when you go back to this settings page? What does the "once" mean then? Ambiguity.

I'd first rename the whole option so it's indicative of what it actually does. I probably wouldn't label it "Scanning Frequency" though it's more accurate. I'd have to look at the screen again and give it a few minutes of thought. Maybe "Automatic Scanning"

Then I'd probably leave it with two items to choose from. Never (off) and "Scan on a schedule" - this last option would then allow you to scroll through sub-options to make sure everyone is appeased: Every "1...24 hours, 48 hours, weekly, monthly"


Anyway, it was just an example of them just quickly stuffing options.



I agree, though it would be better with a different trigger. That is, I'd like it to check even more regularly than hourly, but do so in a way that has negligible or no impact if the filesystem hasn't been touched. Not sure if the mod date on the added folder would be suitable for this.

Having it work while using the UI and watching videos would also be ideal, they really need to lower the impact and throttle the scan so it can happen. I'd hate to add a few movies and then sit there for hours doing something else non-Boxee related before they show up and I can watch them. I know I can browse the filesystem to hit them right away though.

Meh, if this bothered me at all, it would be at the absolute bottom of the list of things I'd like to see them fix...

FWIW, NewEgg has a special on an Atom D510/NM10 bookshelf system with 4GB RAM for $130 with free shipping.

Nice deal. Of course, I need to point out that you'll need to add a hard drive, wireless adapter (if desired), and some method to control it. That'll probably add up to about the same amount as the Boxee Box or more, but you do get more control over the system.

I'm sad about the rare Newegg image fail. They have two shots of the front, one of the side, and one of the contents. No shot of the back? That's not like you, Newegg! *edit* actually, I can't find a shot of the back anywhere on the web */edit*

*edit*
Um, I should also point out that there are no HDMI ports on that box. Or even DVI. Sorry, Bitt, but that's not a very good HTPC. It looks like they're trying to push out old models.

Sorry. Good point. I just assumed.

That said, my HTPC is running (or, rather, is intended to run) solely over the network. No local hard drive or other storage at all.

I'm very very happy with the Zotac HD-ID11 box I purchased last month. It runs Mythtv about as flawlessly as anything else.

It has DVI-D/A, HDMI, SVGA output (via included adapter), with audio over HDMI as well as via SPDIF optical, plus eSATA, USB2, etc..

Nice box.

Cheers

Any word on the latest firmware update? Recent news on the Google TV front hasn't been good, so I'm leaning in the Boxee direction now. How's the new build look?

I just came online to ask the same question. I've been away for just over a week without any net access, so I've yet to even reconnect the Boxee Box to download the update.

The update did exactly what I wanted it to do: put my local content front and center (if I want it to be - you can still set it the other way).

So now, when you bring up the pop-up menu and select "Shows," it immediately takes you to your own shows, which is just what I wanted. I believe "Apps" even takes you to your favorited apps instead of the full list of apps like it did before (I think - I have to test that again).

I haven't delved into the other stuff much, though. I can't even remember what the other changes were. There's sorting stuff, but I don't need that yet.

Other than some bug fixes, the only real major issue with the Boxee Box is the lack of content partners they promised would come. I'm pretty sure they're well past the vague timeframe they gave for Netflix, and closing in on when they promised Vudu. I believe there was no timeframe on Hulu Plus, and given their past battles I'm not surprised it's taking a bit of time.

Still, I wouldn't be surprised if they had another update out by the end of the week, if not the end of the year. At least, that's my hope...

Yeah, I'm concerned about the lack of Netflix. I don't expect Hulu, but it sure would be nice.

Has any progress been made hacking the system to run other things? I don't expect it to be a general-purpose workhorse machine, but I was hoping I'd be able to get a Squeezebox server onto it at some point if that's possible.

Yes. Boxee/DLink close each hole though so if the latest version isn't listed there then its not hacked yet.

Looking at the list of firmware versions, the latest version is 1.0.2.16619 which came out last week and is not currently hackable. At least not publicly.

Ah, neat, I'll keep an eye on that wiki. Bummer that they're not more laissez-faire about running other things on the device, but I can't say I'm surprised.

Previous (unofficial) announcements from Boxee staff indicated that they wouldn't be opposed to people running other things on the box and I believe that they wouldn't be taking active measures to prevent it. I wish I could locate that info now...

Is that at the OS level or Boxee app level?

OS level. I think it might have been mentioned most recently in a thread where someone asked about the possibility of installing XBMC in place of the Boxee app onto the box.

Yeah, it'd be a shame if they reversed that position, or turned a hands-off unofficial position into a more draconian official position.

It does sound like SP3, the next update, is going to be the one to finally address some of these issues in earnest. Apparently there were plenty of bugs left behind with the current release, including messed up networking support, excessive file buffering, some codec errors, wiping of some settings, broken watched/unwatched flagging, etc.

Apparently SP3 will also bring the ability to ignore "the" when sorting. But it's still as yet unknown (to me anyone not previewing that alpha/beta) how this is implemented. Some people were asking for ignoring of "A" as well, and I don't believe that would work very well as a default.

While this past release brought the ability to put your local collection front and center, it is still mixing online content within your content. However, instead of adding in new titles it's only doing this for episodes for TV shows - like the old betas worked. There don't seem to be any plans to stop doing this. It has its pluses and minuses, but the lack of labeling and clarity is what made it a huge PITA in the past - you didn't know which items were local nor which were sourced from the net (nor their quality).

I'm going to wait until SP3 before reconnecting the box - that should be here next week sometime.

And as much as I'd like to see the next update for Boxee, what I really want is the ladies of the iPhone Dev Team and their friends to stop bickering and talking about their curling irons long enough to release a new untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4 already.

I've been informed by a Boxee team member that there's a bug fix for a big annoyance I was having. When watching MKVs, at the points where commercial breaks were removed the Box would rebuffer the video, causing an annoying break-up of the playback. It also seemed to happen randomly on other files that didn't even have commercials.

I'm glad to hear they'll ignore "The." That will help when looking for my movie files. I don't know who was asking for "A" to be ignored. I'm pretty sure that's not correct for this type of thing. "A History of Violence" is not supposed to be under H.

I, too, wish they wouldn't show you online sources for episodes of shows in your collection, but that part doesn't bother me too much. I'd much rather they add Netflix

Also, Bruno, I'm pretty sure they said they'd finally cache the cover art. That's a big annoyance for me. At the very least they should store that in a thumbnail file or something.

Sane people, because: yes; yes, it is supposed to be under 'H'. (Chicago Manual of Style §18.55)

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Oh well, it doesn't matter to me as I don't have any movies with a title like that. So yeah, whatever.

Thankfully "A-Team" has a dash in it.

So, what's the mapping, if any, of the Boxee downloadable application versions (e.g. 0.9.23.15885) to Boxee Box firmware versions (e.g. 1.0.2.16619)? Is it only the last number that's significant for purposes of comparison, and will they be kept in sync?

I ask because I spent some of this weekend reconstituting my old Macbook Pro into a Boxee machine. I figure if the Box doesn't overwhelm me, a little bit of hacking could make my old laptop running in clamshell mode an acceptable stopgap solution. The only wrinkle is infrared input, which is apparently a giant hassle on Macs -- I've tested out a hackish solution involving my Squeezebox receiving IR commands and forwarding them to my Mac, which seems like it might work.

Anyway, my initial tour of Boxee's functionality (it's been at least a year since I looked at it) seems promising, but I'm wondering if what I see in the Boxee app for Mac maps 1:1 to Boxee Box features. Any guidance on that?

The Boxee versions are linear. That means you're running something considerably older on the Mac than what's available on the Box. The versions will (eventually) catch up - supposedly.

What difficulties are you having with IR input on the Mac? Some machines have built-in receivers (your MBP should) and those that don't can use a USB IR receiver (I sell them every day).

Strange that they run newer builds on the "production" boxes. Though, I guess that does give people an incentive to buy them.

My issue is I don't want to use the lame Apple remote -- I just want to use my universal. In my Googling, I haven't found any easy solutions for general IR input using the built-in sensor. I've seen those Keyspan remotes around with their special dongles, and apparently those can read custom IR codes, and it looks like recent Macports builds of lirc can work with IguanaIR receivers, but that means buying something when I have a perfectly good IR receiver sitting in my entertainment system already on my Squeezebox.

If there's an easy solution for getting the built-in Apple IR sensor to read input from a universal remote to control Boxee, I'd be interested in hearing about it, but I couldn't find anything.

The built-in sensor will never read arbitrary IR remote signals without a ground-up re-implementation of its firmware. It does decoding in firmware and even the driver layer only sees the decoded messages.

The easiest solution to using a universal remote is simply to send Apple IR codes from the universal remote. The machine will simply think you're using an Apple remote - but of course that limits you to 6 buttons. Without using third-party remote apps, other software typically only recognizes those 6 buttons anyway.

Using my receiver, it's technically possible to receive any number of codes in any protocol. However the software I currently sell is geared toward the Apple remote. That's going to change, but I don't know when I'll be shipping additional software yet.

The receiver however *IS* supported by Lirc as an MCE receiver (a number of customers are using it under Linux). So if you can get Lirc up and running you can use any remote codes you want and as many of them as you want.

Back to Boxee... The new software and UI still need a lot of work. I believe they want to stabilize this before they bring it back to the general release platform.

I agree, though with this last update, for the first time I'm very happy with the day-to-day use of the device, at least for viewing my own content. The omission of Netflix is still a pretty glaring problem for them right now. In these days where nearly every home theater device seems to have Netflix, they really need to get the service into their Box ASAP. I can live without Vudu and Hulu, but Netflix is essential.

I take it that your receiver just samples, and leaves code synchronization, detection, and mapping to the host software? Or does it have some way to download code to an onboard PIC or something?

(and don't answer any of that if you would rather not, for business reasons)

I recently mated a standard 3-pin 38Khz IR detector to one of those SparkFun FT232R (USB to serial) boards that I like so much. No extra components, and LIRC is happy to use pretty much any remote control with it.

But LIRC does annoy, in that button codes don't appear to get passed to MythTV until the "release event", or until the button is held down much longer than normal. This feels very unnatural -- compare with how the empeg R/C works, a much better implementation.

I think I see some LIRC hacking in my future..

Cheers

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

Here's an "RC" rebuild of the SP3 firmware just posted today. They're not kicking it live for all the boxes just yet, but they've asked people in the forum to take a look at it if they want to try it out first:

Boxee firmware RC 1.0.3.17028

Frankly, none of those changes are enough to make me eager enough to test out the new firmware. I'll hold out until they're ready to push it.

Now, if it had Netflix, I'd be all over it!

Well I took the plunge for you. Resetting wipes all settings on the device, so the Box is currently rescanning all my media folders. I suspect that's going to take at least the rest of the day.

I suppose the main thing I'm looking for here is less crashiness and some additional pep in the UI. I'll be happy if the FFWD/REW and buffering performance is improved, but I seriously doubt it. In terms of features there's only one I'm expecting, article filtering on sort.

Okay, I'm a little pissed off right now, and I don't think it's Boxee's fault (until I have evidence to the contrary). Last night I wanted to show a guest a couple videos that I had added to my "Watch Later" list. I pulled up the first video and it just wouldn't play. So I tried another - nope. So then I tried going to the Youtube Leanback app. The audio played but not the video. Then I tried the Boxee Browser app. No audio or video.

Currently there's a thread on Boxee's forums full of people having the same problem. How about you, Bruno? At this point it's only speculation, but many are thinking Youtube might have finally blocked other boxes from getting their content. They said they'd do this a long time ago, but it looks like they might have just gotten around to it. If that's the case, then I am really pissed off at Google right now...

I don't use YouTube at all, so I don't know. I can check though. I can also check using SageTV to see if it's working there. It doesn't use a YouTube app.

The latest firmware is better and almost worth it alone for the better sorting, but it still has plenty of issues. Like I said, I don't think they'll be able to get through all the issues in any less than a half dozen updates over the next 6 or so months.

My biggest complaints right now are still the scanner, video playback buffering and UI/remote unresponsiveness at times.

I can still hit YouTube from my Apple TV- is that different?

Boxee Box users are thinking that it might be an issue with this. Perhaps Apple simply paid the fee?

If that isn't the issue, nobody is saying otherwise. Boxee has been completely silent on Twitter since CES, and nobody there is responding to the users. I'm finding this to be the most disconcerting development so far. When I have visitors over and want to show them videos I want to know that the device I spent $200 on is going to work. Even if this isn't Boxee's fault, they need to talk to their users. I'm really frustrated here.

*edit*
According to the update to this article, it seems neither Boxee nor Google know off-hand what the problem is. It seems to me that if there must be something Google changed, since Boxee hasn't changed in a month or two...

*edit 2*
Seems I was correct:

So now Boxee is on the D-Link Boxee Box, Iomega Boxee NAS thing, Viewsonic Boxee TV and now Boxee iPad? I don't see the desktop versions ever getting updated!

It certainly seems like it'll be a long while before that happens. At the very least it seems they'll be working on getting Netflix working on their devices first.

It looks like Google has fixed whatever they did to screw up playback for Boxee. I'm a little worried that now they know how to break playback

1.0.3 RC2 has been uploaded with a few more fixes.

http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=26275

They already know how. Its not difficult for Google or any other provider to disable unauthorised playback devices/apps. Adobe already have a DRM streaming system for FLV and SWF verification to stop you from accessing something without the official player. Thats not to say that you can't, just that its harder to do and starts a game of cat & mouse if you really want to do it which will cause issues with the DMCA in the US if you do.

vudu is apparently working on Boxee

I haven't tried it myself, but I might try watching a movie tonight...

I'm pretty sure I already have everything in Vudu's library stored here locally.

It doesn't matter anyway, I can't get it to work on my Box, so I don't know what the story is...

*edit*
apparently it was a mistake. crud...

I tried Plex last night to see if it was any better than Boxee but the UI seemed to be very clunky even though its yet another design thats supposed to work from 10 feet away. You have to do everything with a keyboard or Apple Remote as well which was a little annoying.

This probably deserves its own thread, but I feel nobody gives them enough credit to dedicate a whole thread to it.

http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/05/xbmc-port-from-sigma/

http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/12/more-about-sigma/


I still feel like Boxee has nothing to offer me as I don't care about non-local content. Reading through this thread I see you lot talking about local content quite a bit. XBMC is still the choice for me. If it's in a set-top box it might be able to be the choice for you.

As has been discussed many times in previous threads, you can't build a box like the Boxee Box using XBMC or anything else for $200. I know you'll then come back to me with a list of parts, but remember you also have to include the unique RF remote and all the cables

I don't have anything against XBMC, and I'm sorry if you feel it's not getting enough love. Who's keeping you from starting your own thread on XBMC? This forum doesn't require popularity on a subject to start a thread. Hell, just look at this one and you'll see that 90% of it is a PM between Bruno and me

Lastly, I think Boxee is aiming (whether it's right or not) for the mass consumer market with their software. From what I've seen of XBMC, it's not something any of my clients could use. Now, I don't think Boxee is there either, but it's closer and I think they could figure it out.

I didn't click on the links (yet) but what I've heard is that there will be XBMC set top box coming out in the future based on the Sigma SoC. In that respect it won't be a build-your-own type of device, it will be a finished product. We'll have to see how they finish polishing up the interface, as I didn't like what I last saw running on a desktop.

I've told you a million times... stop exaggerating!

(As of now it's actually only 61.4%.)

tanstaafl.

Fair enough. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it. I'm a huge fan of this type of device, so I like looking into all of them.

One thing going against that product, though, is a very late entry into the market. For the first time ever, it's a market saturated with satisfactory-to-great products. So far none of them have much of a grasp on their users though (like an app store would create), so perhaps there's still room.


Haha! I love that you took the time to calculate it. This board is the best.

?

This is talk of a box you don't need a list of parts to use. Did you click the links? I'm done convincing you to build one (although, my fanart never doesn't work).

You're correct, I was a little quick to respond to certain parts of your post and didn't quite grasp what the articles were about.

I'll be interested in seeing what comes of that project, but I have to ask if you think it'll be ready any time soon. It looks like they have a long way to go.

Sorry for snipping at you, I'm just sick of platform wars around here, that's all, and you came off a little defensive out of nowhere like we'd been keeping you down for your love of XBMC for some reason. I want to avoid that in the future, so once again I'll try to be better about it So let your XBMC flag fly!

*edit*
ps- one last thing though: I honestly do not understand that last parenthetical statement...

That's a very arbitrary number. Eg. How about $195? Not even a Boxee at that price.
I know (fact) that one can assemble an even better system for under $250 now.

(Zotac HD-ID11 + SDcard + 1GB RAM + $10 remote + any number of expanded possibilities).

Cheers

Sorry, I guess you guys were talking about cover art. Whatever it was, your artwork for media was an issue at one point with Boxee. I was just getting my little jab back in.

Lol, I gotcha It is definitely an issue. Not that it doesn't work, just that it reloads it from the web every time, which is extremely slow and annoying. Supposedly the next update fixes that.


I don't think it's arbitrary. We're in a thread all about the Boxee Box, so when someone suggest an alternative, why wouldn't I compare to the Box's price?

I'm glad the prices are coming down, though. I wouldn't mind putting together an inexpensive computer for other purposes.

Would you mind providing a link to the remote you'd get for $10?

One might, but when asking for alternatives you're comparing boxee to others, so an exact price point (eg. $195, or $199.32) is pointless; what we want are comparisons in the same ballpark.

There are similar ($199) boxes to the HD-ID11 out there now, and some even include the $10 remote control in the base price. I don't have a link, as I don't have one of those. But I have seen them -- they do exist.


$9.60 Remote w/receiver

Nice (except that I'm seeing the usual $1 ~= £1 shenanigans). I quite fancy the Acer Aspire Revo R3700 as an HTPC -- I've got the R3610 as a fileserver and it's really small and quiet.

At the moment I'm making do with a Dell T1500 -- work provided it for working from home, but my existing desktop's faster.

Just ensure that whatever you get has "Ion2" graphics (512MB dedicated video RAM), and not the first generation "Ion" graphics (RAM shared with CPU).

The second generation NVidia "Ion2" is capable of full 1080p and can handle temporal/spatial 2X de-interlacing on any content. The first gen stuff stutters on much of that, despite dubious marketing claims.

Cheers

Getting further off-topic: does anyone have a recommendation for a small PC in this form factor that we're talking about, with price as the only option? Lets say I don't care about video at all, and all I need is a tiny form factor, low power, and as little money as possible.

Basically I want something for an always-on computer to serve files and be a possible hub for home automation. So the only ports it needs is USB. I don't need Windows bundled either.

Have you checked Newegg?

I had, but I couldn't seem to find what I wanted. Thanks for taking me right there

I guess around $200 is still the minimum. There are a couple $139 barebones systems, then it's $39 minimum for the hard drive, plus memory. Oh well, I'll wait a little longer

Sorry if I missed it, what software will run on these $200 DIY boxes to provide the functionality? What base OS does that software run on?

No software (other than a Windows driver disc) comes with the "barebones" versions. So one installs the OS+apps of choice, be it from an XBMC LiveCD or Mythbuntu or whatever.

Heck, one could even then install Boxee, or multiboot into Boxee, Myth, XBMC, and anything else.

Cheers

Will XBMC support hardware-based decode/playback on such a system?

Th Zotac you mentioned seems pretty nice, but most of the other ones in the Newegg link are kind of underwhelming - meh.

So it's more like $250 rather than $200. Still better than $350+ from a few months ago.

Yup, full hardware decode. They say the HD-ID11 was designed *for* XBMC. Dunno if that's true or not -- I've never used XBMC myself, but MythTV has full hardware decode on my HD-ID11.

A system like that looks really good to me for $250 (hey, I bought one!), and can do so much more than the dedicated boxees that retail for $50 less.

And dagnabbit.. I've lost the model name of a very similar unit a buddy showed me -- about $20 cheaper than the Zotac, with a faster Atom (1.8GHz rather than 1.6GHz), extra DIMM slot, but no SPDIF out.

Cheers

Jetway seems to be the other big player in that market. Maybe this is the one you were thinking about?

Yeah, that's it! Last week it was on sale for CDN$199, either at newegg.ca or ncix.com. Looked great to me, except HDMI was the only output path for digital audio.

Shuttle also has a nice looking fanless unit in this category, with a massive internal heatsink. But closer to $300 than $200 for the bare box.

Cheers

Mmm.. now that the holiday season has ended, prices seem to have gone up on most of these units, putting a boxee-beater back up into the $275 range.

I think we're still left with the conundrum of not having any suitable software to run on a DIY system. I just revisited the XBMC web site - they have no clear vision of what their project should look like, instead hosting horribly designed skin after horribly designed skin.

Don't get me wrong, some of the skins are pretty, but the concept of "skin" is apt, because the initial beauty is only skin deep. None of them are thought out well enough to feel like they were carefully developed and implemented as part of a complete finished product. They're all just gloss, and IMO, even half-decent UX is lacking in all of the ones I've seen listed. They're all variations on the same bad idea.

Boxee still exists as a free download for Linux.

Desktop Boxee hasn't been updated for ages and its an extremely low priority task for Boxee to do so. They've said that they're concentrating on the Boxee Box and other Boxee devices first.

The desktop verson is still 0.9 something and has the old UI.

Is there some problem with the old UI? I've been using it and don't have any issues.

The default skin for the version of XBMC I downloaded ages ago (MediaStream) seems basically equivalent to the Boxee skin. I'm not really sure what you're going on about.

The old UI works for me but I've never used the new UI at all so no idea if its better or not.

Just saying that the desktop version is currently a deadend in terms of development/updates because Boxee aren't doing anything about it.

That didn't last long. The Zotac HD-ID11 is "on sale" again now for CDN$210, $20 of which might be refunded by MIR.

Cheers

It finally got released last night

The old UI is deprecated and has a number of usability issues along with the build having many bugs.



The XBMC screen shots on their current page as well as those of all the skins, look absolutely nothing like Boxee. The current UI has the main menu items vertically stacked along the left side and each time you select them, the background of the screen changes. It's atrocious. All the skins look like they were put together for use on a monitor that sits about 2 feet from your face, not a TV screen, and they're all super busy. Everyone seems to want to throw up as much "fan art" as possible without ever taking the time to work out the basic principles of a good base interface.

I'm a UI snob though, so maybe it will appeal to some people. I don't think XBMC will appeal to the mass market however. Another thing they need to do is change the name of the project. The "XB" art of ye name is, among other things, a totally irrelevant concept.

I wonder what they charge for it? No mention of pricing on the vudu site.

-ml

$2 for a 2 night rental.

And $5.99 if you want a "HDX" rental.

Really? I thought the $2 *was* for HD. Though I see that Vudu calls HD HDX instead, because they apparently have some other stripped-down lower resolution stuff they currently call "HD."

Other than on some especially rare circumstance would I ever pay that kind of money ($6) for a streaming rental. At $2 I'd bite every now and then if the service were available in Canada. If it didn't come with surround sound, I'd pass completely.

Yeah. $6 for a rental is a bit steep. The $2 for 2 nights SD rental is only a special offer as well. I'm not sure whether its normally more or whether you only get it for 24 hours.

Bruno, I think that the $2 for 2 is a limited number of movies. There are some decent films in there, but some real stinkers that might not even make the Netflix streaming cut.

Their highest quality video is indeed $6 for a rental, but that's for the highest quality, which is, I believe, currently the highest quality HD video you can get over the web at the moment (legally). I think they offer other "HD" streams of varying levels. Say, the next step down is Apple HD, then the step below that is Netflix "HD," then I believe they have SD as well.

I'll verify this, though. The Boxee update came through this afternoon, and I quickly launched the vudu app to see if it was working (it is). Now I just need to set up my account.

I just checked out a sample vudu HDX video. I have to say, it's really freaking good for streaming. Easily the best, and I've seen pretty much all of them at this point.

There are fewer quality levels than I'd thought. There SD, 720p HD, and 1080p "HDX." I don't know how many of these have Dolby Digital 5.1, but at least the top two do, and it sounds great.

Clearly, much of the quality comes down to how compressed the video is. Well, naturally it appears they deliver whatever your bandwidth allows, up to the level you pay for, but it looks like their HDX videos start out at 4.5Mbps and go up to at least 9Mbps. I've attached a shot of the speed test that vudu goes through. In my setup, it instantly shot to 9Mbps and never dropped (thank you Fios). I'm also very pleased with the performance of my WD Livewire (as discussed earlier), as that's what is providing the connection to the Boxee Box.

Lastly, the prices are as follows:

SD - $3.99
HD - $4.99
HDX - $5.99

**edit** I forgot to mention, when you first sign up, the give you $5.99 in credits, so you get a free HDX movie **/edit**

I agree that $6 for a rental is very high, and I don't foresee spending that very often. However, my wife and I just spend $34 to see The Green Hornet in theaters. Yes, it was that expensive because it was in 3D, but guess what: at our theater it was ONLY SHOWING IN 3D! What the hell? Besides, non-3D would still have been $22. This is $6, we get to be nice and comfy in our living room with easily accessible bathrooms, food, and a pause button. We also don't have the three kids behind us without the concept of whispering, or the woman sitting right next to me checking her phone and texting every five minutes (that's the second time in a row that's happened to me).

For the convenience, $6 doesn't look that bad anymore. Plus, I think of it as a supplement to Netflix. There are some good older movies showing up for streaming there (including a documentary about The Minutemen I want to see), and with that combination I think I'll be going to the theater much less often.

In conclusion, once Boxee adds Netflix to the Box, I'll officially be happy and completely set. Everything else will just be gravy to me.

I'm suspecting that anything in a 16x9 format is getting called HD these days.

John Q. Public got taken to the cleaners when the HD standards were defined with the ability to degrade the bandwidth.

If you can't watch movies on Vudu at the same time as they're in theaters, then that point is sort of moot. If Vudu gets movies at the same time as they're available to everyone on DVD and BluRay, you can compare to renting at Blockbuster or buying the title outright.

If I could stream a movie on the day in opens in the theaters for $6 then I'd probably do that quite a few times over the course of the year.

I can buy a used DVD for $2, watch the movie and then sell it for $3. Profit of $1.

I've actually never seen this. Every time something is marketed as HD, it's at least 720p.

Now, there's certainly a question about how much compression different content providers use on their HD streams. That definitely varies. Although I'd still say even the worst is usually better than SD.


True, true. Though all those alternatives don't have the convenience of VOD. I can't get to all the movies I want to see in the theater anyway, so waiting isn't always a problem. Also, Blockbuster is dead, and Redbox has a terrible selection (and none of the ones around me rent blurays). Now that I think about it, I don't think I could go out right now and rent a bluray disc anywhere near me! That's weird to think...

And I could buy a $30 bluray, but not many people see "used bluray" and will pay you more than $6 less than the price you paid for it, so you're behind there too.


Are you really saying that's a better method? I really don't think that $1 is worth my time to make it. How do you go about selling these used DVDs?

Personally I'd rather just stream it. Like I said, when I average it out with my Netflix subscription, I don't feel like I'm spending too much.

Its not just suspiciously low bit rates for HD and no firm definition of what HD streamed content is. You also have issues with deinterlacing of content.

Here's what I was talking about when I said I didn't like XBMC's UI:

http://www.engadget.com/photos/xbmc-now-on-the-new-apple-tv/#3794728

IMO, it looks like trash.

Looks okay to me -- definitely has a positive WAF.

My bro-in-law just bought a Vizeo TV with Netflix and Vudu (and Amazon video and Hulu). After playing with it for a few days, I can tell you that Netflix's selection of streaming movies is awful compared to Vudu's, especially if you want to watch anything recent. For a company that's talking big about abandoning the DVD's and becoming a streaming service, they better get their butts in gear and get some content deals (or if they've already got the deals, make more content available). Haven't used his free 5.99 on Vudu yet. Will have to see if I can get him to do it before I leave. I gotta say, it's really nice having all that built into the TV. It also will play local content via USB. Almost makes a Boxee superfluous (although the local content UI leaves a lot to be desired).

This is probably the main reason I'll be renting more movies for home. Oddly, being close to Hollywood means I have access to worse movie theaters then when I was in Austin. Higher prices to get into a theater, with a noticeable reduction in quality over what I had.

If someone was using their cell phone like that at an Alamo Drafthouse, they would have been escorted out the second time. The kids wouldn't have been there in the first place unless it was a below 21 showing or they came with parents. And same situation with them being kicked out if they were caught talking. I really hope the concept of food and a movie takes off nationwide, because with waitstaff in the room, problems are solved real quick.

Generally now if I do attend a regular theater, I'm more vocal towards people ruining the experience. I stood up and asked the person behind me to stop kicking my seat during Avatar last year in Colorado. They sheepishly looked at me, didn't say a word, and never touched the seat again. After having nearly 5 years of excellent theater experiences, my tolerance for disruptions is much lower then it used to be.

Big complaints: lack of consistency, fonts sized for use on monitor not TV, cheap taiwan-style file browser elements that look like they were lifted from a generic $50 media streamer. I also really hate photos used to show what menu item you have selected (for instance the giant picture of the living room and TV)

SageTV copied the UI for version 7, except with very bad font choices, crappy photos and poorly drawn graphic elements. Needless to say, I'm still using the UI from version 6.

No one gets it 100% right, but the parts Boxee got right, IMO, work a lot better than most others.

I do still wish that more people would learn from TiVo's really simple left and right (in and out / forward and back) method of entering and exiting menus. All this having to press a menu key which actually means "back" (copying Apple's lame iPod UI) is really annoying (Boxee does this).

Well there's your problem. I think it's a general consensus among film geeks that the Alamo Drafthouse is one of the best theaters in the world. It's hard to top that

I'm talking about a multiplex in one of the largest and most popular malls in America. It also, unfortunately, happens to be the best theater in the immediate area (though for some odd reason it seems to decline every month).


Perhaps it's because I know what the selection USED to be like, but it's not that bad these days for non-new releases.

But it also means you have access to some of the best, too, if you meet the right people. Make friends with a member of the DGA. (And, as a bonus, if you're going to a screening at the DGA, there's an amazing pancake restaurant next door. The lines are long, but...)

If the looks are the only thing holding you back install a different theme or make a better one? It's open source. It can only get better if people that care help it to do so.

Also, it has a library mode. Why would you ever need to view raw files? I haven't seen a raw directory listing on it since I set the path for the library.

Every theme seems to be a variation on the base. Or at the very least it must be extremely difficult to do certain things as they all have a number of common denominators.

I'm really looking for a finished product. That's because I've already designed a better UI for a product I was working on and shelved. Not about to start up the same work on someone else's product without a strategy to monetize the work.

Boxee is also open source, and I'm not about to try tackling its bug fixes.



I wouldn't. Is this in reply to someone else?

Sorry, it was a reply to your next post.

MythTV used to be simple (Right-in, Left-out) like that too. Then they decided it was too intuitive or something, so they added more bling images and made the Left-out stop functioning in *half* of the places.. Doh!

I patched the source code in my copy of 0.23 here to restore sane navigation again -- works very very well, patched. That's what is holding me back from upgrading to 0.24: having to redo all of those patches again.

But it'll happen sooner than later now, I think, because an increasing number of downloads give jerky playback on 0.23, yet are smooth on the 0.24 trial I have on the HD-ID11 box. For now, I just let the TV play back the ones that MythTV 0.23 has trouble with. Handy, that feature.

Cheers

XBMC is now supported on Apple TV. I think that's cheaper than Boxee Box. Apparently it does full 720p/1080p hardware decoding, too. Is the box fast enough to have a responsive UI, though?

Apple TV's A4 SoC is not powerful enough for clean/perfect 1080p. XBMC may do some 1080p streams with hiccups, but it will more than likely completely choke on streams with higher bandwidth. The situation should change if the rumors of the new ATV revision (and A5 SoC) are true.

This turns out to have been Linux kernel related. The HD-ID11 is running 2.6.36, whereas the main box had 2.6.35. Updating the latter to 2.6.37 eliminated the jerky playback. Curious, that.

Cheers

Apparently a popular upgrade is to install a Broadcom CrystalHD decoder card (mini PCIe) to get smooth 1080p with minimal CPU usage.

I might get one for my netbook eventually.

An update on Boxee Box:

This weekend we watched two movies on vudu, both in HDX. My wife and I had a guest visiting for the weekend, and we wanted to do a movie marathon. We decided to just chill out at our place and see what movies were available.

We watched The Town and Despicable Me, both of which were good movies (the latter was better), and both of which looked incredible and sounded great. Yeah, it would have cost $12 (one was free), but I really do think it was worth it for the quality and convenience.

At some point I'm going to check out the quality of the SD video.

Apparently reading/participating in the Boxee forum gives your Box all sorts of problems, so stay away and hopefully everything will stay relatively stable with yours.

I have yet to update to the release version of SP3 as I haven't had much movie watching time lately.

It was on my list for my Samsung NC10 (which has room and pads for another mini-PCIe card, but no header), but then it was stolen

I think thats for the old Apple TV. The new one is all integrated into one tiny PCB.

Bummer. Digikey has the headers (CDN$2.68/each), but I'll have to wait until I accumulate enough stuff for a minimum order.

Cheers

I must mention here my thanks to Mark, whose comments much earlier in this thread about the Zotac Atom/Ion machine pushed me in the direction of finally setting up a dedicated video player pc. I recently upgraded my tv to a rather nice 42 inch Panasonic plasma screen (TX-42PG20B, in case anyone cares) and was looking for a good solution to playing the fileserver video through it. It's my first TV upgrade in 11 years, and I wanted it to work properly.

I ended up, after a lot of research, picking up a Foxconn nt330i box, which is even smaller than the Zotac unit, and cheaper at least in the UK, although admittedly doesn't have as much IO. It has more than enough for the role it's in though, and with the latest XBMC on it (which took about 15 minutes in total to install and configure), works really amazingly well. I'm quite impressed.

And to be honest, I quite like the mediastream UI I have seen much worse in commercial products, and at least it's internally consistent.

So, thanks for showing me the direction to go in, Mark.

pca

Say.. does XBMC attempt to handle [BBC] iPlayer at all?

Looks like a great XBMC box, Patrick!
It's first-gen Ion, rather than Ion2, but XBMC knows how to squeeze the most from it, so I imagine it looks and performs very well there!

I've gotta try XBMC here someday.

Here's some new software I just found out about today. Probably the most similar to something I was designing back in early 2005 in fact (in concept, not necessarily exact UI paradigm). In 2004 I knew that this product category had legs and would lead to some decent money. Alas...

http://www.moovida.com/

It works really well. Playing a Bluray rip, which is the largest file with the highest bit rate of anything I have here, at about 6GB per hour, full 1080P, it uses about 20% cpu. That seems to be spread evenly across both cores and both hyperthreads. So far I haven't found anything it won't play perfectly, although a friend of mine who got one having seen my one has found it has issues with some DVB-T streams he's recorded.

It seems to be an issue with the front end not correctly identifying the raw stream, as the underlying mplayer will handle it perfectly if manually started.

And yes, it works really well with iplayer. There is a plug-in for it which, after some struggling to get it to install properly due to some slightly broken scripts, does a very good job.

The thing is considerably faster than I would have expected, in fact. It would probably make a very nice desktop machine for someone who wasn't a power-user. The only problem I had was getting 5.1 surround working correctly. When it was fed up the HDMI cable and back out of the TV into the receiver via optical, the center channel disappeared. Connecting the optical out from the foxconn box directly to the receiver fixed it. I suspect it's more a problem with the TV than the PC, although it might be some odd HDMI incompatibility due to differences in supported standards.

pca

Only for Windows. Fail.

It'd be nice if it worked on a plain Linux system, but them's the breaks. I'm guessing they'd make that move if an OEM were interested in running the software on their box. As a retail product, Windows is the OS that makes the most sense for any significant ROI at this time.

Pretty likely. I know my own TV's manual warns that audio fed through it reappears as 2-ch stereo on the optical output. I prefer to just feed the optical out from the Atom/Ion2 straight into the 5.1 surround system. Probably less audio delay to compensate for that way, too.

Today I wasted several hours debugging why my MythTV playback was suddenly jerky again with several high-bitrate files.. only to narrow it down to a TV bug of some kind.

I discovered that I can restore smooth playback mid-stream again by turning off the TV's 120Hz mode and then turning it (120Hz) back on again.

Now I just need to write that down somewhere so I'll remember the recipe for next time it (jerky playback) happens.

Cheers

That's just plain ugly!

I was thinking more of OS X. I've been looking for something like that to run on my Mac. Wasn't too keen on boxee yet when I tried it earlier.

You can also try Plex, which, like Boxee, is based on XBMC but with yet a different UI.

While I use a Mac as my primary machine, and would only ever continue to buy them in the future, I don't think I could see myself dedicating one to duty as a media system connected to the TV.

It's super difficult to support multiple platforms out of the gate, but hopefully they've created it in such a way as to allow for porting later on. If they want OEM contracts they'd really have to.

I've tried Boxee on my Mac, but honestly, the only reason I keep or use any similar programs on the Mac anymore is strictly for testing purposes. MPlayer is what I use to quickly play back a single video on the desktop when needed.

With a box like the Zotac ZBOX Blu-ray Series ZBOXHD-ID34BR.

Is there still a use for something like the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder. Or does the ION handle what the decoder card would do?

The Ion2 functionality includes the stuff the Crystal HD decoder does, plus a whole lot more.

The point for the Crystal HD decoder, is that it can be plugged into a system that lacks modern NVidia hardware (eg. most netbooks), to enable them to handle (up to) 1080i/1080p playback.

I'm thinking of adding one to my Samsung N210 netbook (which has no Nvidia hardware), as an internal PCIe card, someday perhaps.

The Nvidia hardware handles full hardware decode, deinterlacing, IVTC, and presentation to the display (etc..).

The CrystalHD chip handles full hardware decode, but something else still has to shuffle the bits to a display.

Cheers

The Frys near Anaheim had the Boxee Box on the shelves. 20 total units, 13 of them were open box returns with a $10 discount. Guess these aren't going over well with even the Frys crowd in the area.

The forums have been ablaze for months. The Box has a lot of promise, but the launch was botched on multiple levels unfortunately.

The Boxee team said too much up front and a lot of people held those words as promises. They also shipped software that was immature, having changed over from a very different UI previously.

I don't know when it will achieve balance, but the developers are definitely aware of the current situation.

This is probably the finest example of why it made sense for Boxee not to do their own hardware platform. All returns are at Dlink's expense if they go back to the factory. Boxee apparently doesn't make any money from the Box sales.

It's probably still doing a lot better than Google TV though.

Don't know about that. At work, I've heard exactly zero chatter about the boxee, talk so far is about Apple and Google TV.

I work alone, so I can't count the chatter here. But I know that I bought a number of Boxee Boxes for people and I have never heard anyone mention that they've even seen or heard of Google TV before.

It did make an impact in the media, and it's been blocked by a lot of network websites. I'd heard it was put on hold by Google, but I do see that the Logitech Revue, the only stand-alone product I've heard of, is still available for sale from Logitech. At least I can add it to the shopping cart. Using Firefox - it doesn't work using Google Chrome. Oops.

Yes, there's talk about Google TV, but that's because it's Google and it's an ambitious product. There was a lot of talk about the Kin, too, and I'm pretty sure that more Boxee Boxes have been sold than Kin phones I know that's a bad analogy because of different types of devices, but sometimes awareness isn't everything.

The best sellers, though, are Apple TV and Roku. Naturally, that's because they both have the best prices, and Roku arguably has the best product (AND the best price).


I think seeing a bunch of returns on a shelf and calling that a failure is a little premature. I, for one, am completely satisfied with the services my Boxee Box currently provides. I'm very disappointed that they didn't get the services they promised in the amount of time they promised them, but what they have already I'm more than pleased with.

I use the Boxee Box for three things and three things only:

1) watching local content - this thing is fantastic for watching my local media and no other commercial device out there does this better.

2) renting movies - I've now watched about a half dozen 1080p movies with full surround sound. Not many other set top boxes have vudu support, and no other streaming service delivers the video/audio quality that vudu does.

3) watching online video - IMO, no other box does this as well as the Boxee Box, and for one reason: Watch Later. I have a browser bookmark which, when I see a video I want to watch on the big screen later, I just click this bookmark and it's saved to my list. The next time I'm at my TV, I can just go into my list of videos and watch away. I click that bookmark at least twice a day. It's a great way to save great clips to show friends later, too.


So, as I've said before, I couldn't be happier with the services my Boxee Box provides already. The one missing component is Netflix, and that sounds so close to completion it's driving me nuts. I also have a feeling it's going to be one of the best implementations of Netflix of any device on the market at the moment, tied only with the PS3 (at least this is the impression I got from Avner Ronen when I was emailing him).

Oh yeah, and I love the keyboard on the remote. All set top boxes should have this or a really good remote app for all smartphone platforms. I refuse to ever use a d-pad to type ever again I do wish the keyboard was backlit, though...

The Roku box doesn't play local content. Seems, like all other Roku products, it's a slightly over-hyped POS. Remember their music players that arguably looked cool, but had to piggy-back on Slim Devices' software?

That's the only reason I didn't buy one, but as we've previously discussed, this is not an issue for the average consumer.


What? It's by far the winner in this game so far, easily outmatching AppleTV. It's cheaper and has more content available (and two models that can play 1080p).

I've actually been asked several times which box to buy, and my response is always the same: if you deal with the iTunes store a lot, go with the Apple TV, otherwise get a Roku.

When Apple TV came out, everyone said that the $100 price point would make it an easy buy for consumers. Well, the $60 price point for a Roku is a hell of a lot easier.

The Apple TV is a POS too. I'd still tell someone who wants a low-cost media player to stick with WDTV of some sort. I don't know anyone who doesn't *ALSO* want to be able to play local content. And everyone else I know that has a media player are the least techy people I know.

I didn't say it was a failure just because of that. I have no idea how many the store has also sold and people have kept. Seeing that many returned though and still sitting on the shelf would make me suspicious that something was wrong, and I'd do a bit more research before just buying it at the store. I've never seen that high of a percentage of returned vs new products at Fry's before, so it was a bit surprising.

My only problem with the Boxee Box is that I currently lack a TV to attach it to :-) If I didn't already have an extra Mac Mini waiting for my future TV, the box might interest me for playing back videos off my ReadyNAS. I've had far better luck with just streaming off a share then I have over DLNA.

One big thing helping Roku is Netflix. For a while, they had an ad on the inside of the Netflix DVD mailers. That alone probably exposed more people to both the streaming service and the $60 box option.

On the AppleTV side, I'm curious to see how many end up in non home use. One of the really handy features coming soon will be expanded Airplay support including in apps like Keynote. At Vigil, we had a monthly company meeting where the different teams showed off their work, and it was always a traffic jam at the presenter controls as people swapped around, and they juggled between Photo Viewer, PowerPoint and Windows Media Player to show things off. All the managers there have iPads, so future presentations could just happen by each of them beaming their content to the TVs wirelessly.

The Roku does play local content - though only on their $100 box, and only via an attached USB drive. I'd prefer it to have the option of doing this from a network share, there is a paid for ($15) add on channel that can stream from a webserver - again not an ideal solution, as it is third party, but an option.
So to correct Bruno Roku does do local content. Personally I don't have a great need for local streaming, I never purchased a significant number of DVDs, or downloaded torrents.

From a UI point of view I gather the Roku has the WDTV and the like beat. I've not used a WDTV, but I've seen complaints about it's sluggishness.
We've had out Roku for 2.5 years, so yeah I am biased. The UI and remote is simple enough for my 3.3 yr old daughter to select the next episode when her cartoon finished - yeah this is both good and bad
This weekend we brought it with us to the in-laws, it plugged right in and Just Worked. Later they wanted to watch "The Social Network" but where having issues with Comcast On Demand - it only took a few minutes to register our Roku with our amazon account and to search for the movie, $4.99 in HD (don't know if this was 720 or 1080).

How does Amazon's Video on Demand compare with Vudu for content and pricing? I think this is a fair comparison than comparing Vudu, per movie, with Netflix, all you can eat streaming (assuming you can find something you like...), due to the different pricing models.

I was aware of that, but I don't count Roku's local media playback because it's awful. I don't want to sneakernet my files to the box, and I don't want to pay $15 more to play that stuff. Compared to Boxee, nothing else matches its ability to play local content.


I'd love to hear why. It seems like a terrible inconvenience to me. I love throwing stuff on my NAS and having it automatically show up on my Boxee, all nicely sorted with artwork and episode info.


I can't imagine recommending the WDTV to anybody I know. The UI is terrible. And Bruno, all the people who have asked me about boxes like this have no local content to view anyway. They want to know how to get Netflix onto their TV. If that's what an average consumer wants, there's no cheaper and better way to do it than with a Roku. I just don't understand why you think it's a POS. Just because you don't like it?


Nobody would compare vudu and Netflix on a per-movie basis for one reason: Netflix only dreams of having the same movies vudu [or Amazon] does. vudu and Amazon have the big/recent movies, and Netflix unfortunately can't match that.

As far as pricing between vudu and Amazon goes, it's actually pretty easy to compare the prices. Promotions aside, Amazon typically charges $3.99 for recent movies (see this page for a random sample of fairly recent big releases). Those are all prices for SD streaming of movies to your desktop computer.

If you go through an Amazon VOD device you have the option to rent HD movies. In general, those prices will be $1 more than their SD counterpart (so we're at $4.99). Those are the two options you get with Amazon.

Now, on vudu the prices are essentially the same. They start at $3.99 for SD, go to $4.99 for HD 720p, but then they top out at $5.99 for 1080p.

The challenge in comparing the prices then comes down to comparing the quality of the streams. It looks like Amazon's bitrate tops out somewhere in vudu's mid-range, so the the comparison seems to work out pretty well. As far as I've seen, there's no other streaming service out there that matches vudu's highest quality video (which really is gorgeous, streaming or not).

Because everyone that asks ME about such a device wants/needs to play back local content. The online stuff is a nice treat. And the WDTV is cheap. Yes, the UI is lacking. Everything is compared to the Boxee.

Oh, and if they wanted access primarily to Netflix, I'd recommend a BluRay player, which at less than $100 also plays BluRay and DVD physical media, which can also be gotten from Netflix (in the US).

I think you are mis-reading me. I agree the sneaknet way is poor, it works but cumbersome, plus they only support limited file types/encoding schemes. The proper way is to pull it over the network, be that a file share (preferable), web server or custom app.

Jon had previously compared Netflix's selection to Vudu's, which I believe is invalid, but I was curious as to how Amazon and Vudu differ, pricing wise their equal as you say.

We don't care about local content at all.

We just upgraded to Apple TV 2 for the netflix support. My biggest complaint thus far was finding the thing in the store, as it pretty much just looks like an iPod docking station.

Ah, I did misread you and I'm sorry for that. Oops!


I hadn't really thought about it myself so it was interesting to take a look at it for my post.

I used to really love Amazon's VOD, but now I just don't use it. First of all, I can't order video from the web and send it to my Tivo. Scratch that - technically I can, and that process works really well, but it has two problems:

1) There is no way to order HD content from the website and push it to the Tivo. You have to order it directly from the Tivo. Unfortunately this eliminates the deals you get in their weekly newsletter.

2) If you do order video from Amazon's website, content to get SD video, Tivo then presents it to you in the worst possible way: non-anamorphic. When you play it back, you get black bars on the top, bottom, AND sides. You can change the aspect on the Tivo remote, but this ends up cutting something off and it looks just terrible.

So I've switched to vudu entirely and I love it. The quality is stunning, the interface is excellent, and while the prices are high, I've found that I don't mind them too much. The convenience makes up for it.

I'm back in Belize now, or I'd try it out and tell you

No more streaming video for me. In town, I'm stuck on 128k DSL and in the village I have Hughesnet with their draconian 500mb daily download limit.

Ouch! That's awful! What, do you have to disable image downloading at that point?

Yeah, you'd burn through that in about 20 minutes with Netflix streaming...

My mom used to be on Hughesnet, shared from a neighbor. It was horrible with the daily limits, as once the threshold is crossed, speed drops to near or below dialup speeds. This made it near impossible for her to download anything large. And if it was a security update day, multiple computers could easily ensure the limits was crossed. I think their plan capped at 300mb a day.

She has since switched to Wild Blue, and is much happier. Instead of a daily limit, it's a 30 day rolling window. So if a big file has to be downloaded, it can be done without crippling the connection. Overall the speeds also seem quite a bit better. It's been the first time we can reliably do a video conference call, though audio still is best over a phone due to the satellite lag.

Actually, the tier 1 plan limit is 250mb a day. We were hitting it on a daily basis and moved to the 500mb plan. They "generously" provide you with a free period between 2 and 5 AM Eastern to do updates for AV and OS.

Stick with Wild Blue. One of my buddies makes their satellite transmission hardware. They've got some good stuff coming down the pipe. I had him check and due to the more focused beams they use, it's not an option for me down here in Central America.

How is it on just voice? I'm planning to go to voip for my 4 business lines, because I hate getting ripped off by ATT, but I don't wanna have to continue to buy dsl from ATT to avoid ATT. The cable company here is even worse...

It'll still have that extra (satellite distance) 1/4 second delay, which might not be good on top of the usual voip delays.

Yep, no getting around the fact that the signal has to travel much further then it would via land or radio based methods. Both WildBlue and HughesNet use geosynchronous satellites to save on cost. They sit 22,300 miles away, compared to satellites for the iridium phones at a low 485 miles. For perspective, the earth is about 25,000 miles around at the equator. So every time a data packet is sent over the WildBlue link, it travels the distance of almost 2 trips around the entire globe. Iridium satellite phone signals travel the distance of the length of California, plus a little over half of Oregon.

Iridium NEXT will have data support, but they don't start launching until 2015.

Satellite internet providers have tricks to accelerate web browsing, where they see the initial request come in on their side, and start also requesting all the pictures, and other page contents automatically. They then send that info right behind the initial request before even receiving the request from your computer. This helps browsing normal HTTP sites, but the slowdown comes right back for any HTTPS, or AJAX type of web activities.

HUZZAH!!

For everyone else: Netflix (US and Canada) on Boxee Box release Valentine's Day with a new firmware update.

This update also adds support for my IR receivers.

Sorry, clearly people don't like clicking-through I'll be sure to include more info in my posts in the future. I was just a little excited by this announcement, and it works really well.

I had already updated and came here to write the same thing, but you beat me to it.

I was just messing with you because Trevor had done the exact same thing around the same time

I could swear that a new XBMC thread was created at some point, but maybe not.

Anyway, I finally got my HTPC up and running like I want. Zero internal storage, booting via PXE and root filesystem on iSCSI. (I tried NFS root, but it seemed kinda flaky, and I already had an OpenFiler server up and running, so adding an iSCSI target was trivial.)

Anyway, I decided to install XBMC instead of Boxee this time, and I'm reasonably pleased with it. There are some issues with the library. It's clearly more oriented towards filesystem navigation, and the library acts more like a virtual filesystem than it ought to. Boxee is definitely more polished on this front. Ignoring that, the UI (of the default skin, anyway) seems no less polished than Boxee's.

This is mostly just initial reaction, though. I haven't really played with it a lot yet.

I'm going to join you guys on this thread soon, I bought an Acer Revo R3700 from eBuyer for £185 (link). Atom D525 (Dual Core 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB, ION2, SPDIF Audio, Gigabit, 802.11n, HDMI, SD Card Slot, More USBs than you can shake a stick at... and its tiny and practically silent.

Using it for a bunch of random stuff at the moment, but the plan is to play around with Boxee / XBMC etc - but it'll probably be a month or two until I actually get around to it.

Do either of you guys need an IR receiver for those systems?

Nope. Built in. Though I probably need to modify the receiver "window".

Thanks Bruno, but I don't think I'd use it. I'll probably pick up a PS3 Sixaxis gamepad and use that with QTSixA. Should work okay and it'd be fun to play some PSX games in emulation with it too.

Talking about controllers, ones that seem interesting after a few minutes of searching are the Logitech diNovo Mini, Lenovo N5901, and the Boxee Box Remote amongst a sea of other cheap little keyboards.

The Logitech one is pretty nice, backlit, Bluetooth but kinda expensive. The Lenovo and Boxee remotes use 2.4GHz dongles, shared with the Playstation Bluetooth, Wifi G, DECT Phones all in the same room so not ideal.

Anyone have any tips for a small inexpensive neat and usable bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad/trackball? I'm leaning towards using the Lenovo for messing around with the HTPC and the Sixaxis for watching stuff and playing.

Logitech makes a nice lightweight (nearly fullsize) combo "Cordless Mediaboard for PS/2" with touchpad. Works fine with PCs as well as the PS/2.

I have the non-bluetooth version (link) here, two of them, and it's fantastic -- works with the BIOS Setup and everything else, because it behaves exactly as a (wireless) USB HID.

The bluetooth version (link) is identical (but black), except for the bluetooth part. Not so sure about BIOS Setup with anything bluetooth.

Cheers

Currently there's only one half-decent product I know about, but I can't recommend it from personal experience. It's a Chinese ODM product that's being sold under many names, including "Rii" - you can look it up on Amazon.

Someone in the forum may be working on a better product already though.

Except that he was looking at "the Logitech diNovo Mini, Lenovo N5901, and the Boxee Box Remote amongst a sea of other cheap little keyboards." That Logitech is nothing like those and far bigger. Your household might be different, but over here a full-sized keyboard with trackpad simply wouldn't fly I also just don't want it myself. It seems like a bad form factor for a lean-back experience. The only reason for a full keyboard is if you plan on doing a LOT of typing, and that seems unpleasant on a home theater TV anyway. But hey, it's great if it works for you.

I can speak to at least two of those small keyboards, though:

N5901 - I bought one of these in an online sale Lenovo was running where it was something like half-off. I wouldn't recommend one. The plastic feels really cheap (the trackball especially), the keyboard is not at all fun to type on, and the keys all sort of blend together with no separation between them. It's really bad - avoid it.

Boxee remote - I own a Boxee, so naturally I'm a bit partial to the remote, but that doesn't mean it's without its problems. While I don't find myself pressing the letter keys when using the front of the remote, I do often accidentally click the d-pad when typing. The front of the remote also has a bit too few buttons for my taste. The last problem I'll talk about in the next paragraph. All that said, the remote works perfectly, and it's nice to not need line of sight.

Dinovo Mini - This is the one I can't speak to from having used it, but when I was looking at putting together an HTPC, this was my number one choice. The only reason I haven't picked one up is that it's the most expensive of the mini keyboard options that I've looked at. IMO it's the perfect form factor for an HTPC remote/keyboard, with a great set of controls. But the primary reason I'd recommend it without even having used it is the back-lit keyboard. After using the Boxee remote for several months now, this is its biggest problem. I often use the remote when the lights are dimmed, and unless they're very bright it's impossible to read the keys.

So there's my opinion, whatever it's worth. The only negative I'd have for the Dinovo (aside from the very high price), is that it's bluetooth, and I hate bluetooth (but we've gone over that before, and I seem to be far outnumbered in that opinion ).

Good luck!

Okay, I took "keyboard" literally there. If you folks want a remote-control with a quert[yz] pad, then that's something different.

cheers

I have a Rii and it's pretty nice, for what it is. The trackpad works well, and it seems well built. It's exactly the wrong size for efficient typing, though. It's too small to type normally (not to mention the fact that its keys are laid out in a grid instead of offset rows), and it's too big for thumb typing. But it's about the same size as an average remote control.

I bought mine from "Brando". They have a lot of keyboards.

That's what I took away from the product images online as well.

Oh, and in addition to what Matt said about the Boxee remote, its build quality is sub-par. Super flexible and fragile with really poor tactile response on the keyboard side and a symmetrical top side that you'll find yourself picking up upside down a lot. Not recommended as a purchase. I mostly use IR for my Boxee Box and only pick up the stock remote when I need to type something into it.

I think for most setup and real messing around with the HTPC, I would probably run a remote X session to my laptop, so a full sized keyboard just isn't needed. For those installation times when you do need to plug something in, the USB keyboard that comes with the Acer is small and neat, and it'd work just fine.

So, back to the small keyboard for day-to-day launching apps with gnome-do, typing search queries into Boxee and whatnot. The Rii looks cool, I did see it on my quick search, its definitely on my shortlist.

Its a shame that the Boxee remote isn't backlit, and yeah Matt I too think it would be better with just a few more buttons. I blame the Apple influence. Wish it had an accelerometer chip in there so it knows what way up the remote is and turn off the buttons on the bottom, that would be a neat feature. I think the lack of touchpad/trackball on there rules it out for me from a HTPC perspective rather than something that is a pure Boxee Box.

I've still got some time before the Acer ends up under a TV so I can think about it a bit. The diNovo is twice the price of the Rii (a third of the price of the Acer Revo!)... I think once its actually under a TV and I figure out how much I use it, I'll also figure out whether its worth it.

At first I thought you meant PS/2, but it seems you meant PS2 or PS3. Keyboards (including the smaller pads) are worth a look from the gaming side. This PS3 one works as both a keyboard and mouse over Bluetooth, though paring is a little odd and may need special drivers. Mouse wise, the chat pad has a toggle between keyboard and mouse. When mouse mode is activated, the entire keyboard surface turns into a touchpad for mousing. It's not the most precise experience but could work for a media system.


The Logitech Bluetooth keyboards and mice I've seen/used in the past come with their own USB Bluetooth dongle. If the keyboard and mouse is paired to it, it works for BIOS setup and OS setup. It does this by handling all the Bluetooth side inside the dongle, then telling the machine a generic USB keyboard and mouse is attached. Later on when the OS is fully booted and loads bluetooth drivers, control is handed over from the dongle to the drivers. Some integrated Bluetooth controllers will do the same, including the ones Apple uses in their computers.

Oh wow cool I hadn't considered those things, thanks Tom. I'm going to look into that chatpad thing more at some point, it looks really interesting!

lol at "sleek and elegant design" in the description

Wow, I spent way too long looking at this stuff right now. Okay, well the PS3 Chatpad looks kinda ugly, but the Xbox 360 Chatpad looks really kinda awesome.

Backlit keys, really nice looking and definitely something that I'd go for if there was hope of getting it working. The wireless Xbox 360 Controller requires the USB Wireless Gaming Receiver to connect to a PC, and this should all work okay in Linux... but there is no chatpad support. After pages and pages of people trying, there is an Alpha Driver available for Windows (supposed to be open source too), but it has the disclaimer that it is for Wired controllers only, and somehow the protocol for the wireless ones is significantly different. Oh well, I think it is a dead end for now at least.

Interesting, Tom. This isn't something I've seen before. My wife's previous desktop set, Microsoft's bluetooth keyboard and mouse, were unable to work in the BIOS. It's good to know that Logitech's stuff does. I can't remember if my old Dell keyboard (basically Logitech) keyboard worked in the BIOS...

Frankly, I wish these bluetooth products would simply work all inside the dongle. Installing a bluetooth stack in Windows is a nightmare, and always breaks for me. I'll stick with RF, thank you



I'll agree on the build quality and partially on the symmetrical issue. There's a definite, raised Boxee logo on one end of the remote, so as long as I make certain to orient yourself using that every time you pick the remote up, I never have a problem.

When it comes down to it, the Boxee remote is sufficient for me. It works for what I need it for. I simply DO NOT want to type a lot when I'm at my home theater, so I only need the most rudimentary keyboard. For me, as long as I can avoid using the on-screen keyboard with a d-pad (I hate that), I'm happy.

I just thought of another possible option, but I don't know if it would even work: the Tivo Slide. I just did about 3 minutes of searching, and it looks like it might be possible to use this thing with an HTPC, but don't quote me on that, and I don't know what OSs might support it. What I do know is that this thing is now my favorite remote of all time. It's the perfect compact size (about 2/3 the size of the "glo-remote"), and has a great feel to it. Every key has a nice, soft, equal backlight. Best of all, it's a Tivo remote, and I maintain that I've never used a better remote. I even don't mind that it's bluetooth. The range has problems, and I had to add a second USB extension cable to the one that came with it in order to get it to the VERY front of my TV stand, but once I did it's worked seamlessly.

Engadget: Motorola NYXboard surfaces from the dead, XBMC reclaims it.

POS. Everything on it seems like an afterthought. And some things like no thought at all.

Yeah...I'd have to hold one in my hand. I think it's lacking a number of useful buttons for every day operation. I also disagree with the writer that the Harmony remotes would compete with this. They seem like different animals to me.

They did seem to give thought to some issues, though. I like that it turns off the side that's facing down. My first thought when I saw this was that if I accidentally hit the small number of buttons on the other side of my Boxee remote, I'd hit all kinds of keys on this one. I do wonder what kind of angle it would work on, though. I tend to type on my Boxee remote while reclining, making the remote practically vertical.

I can't tell if the buttons are backlit. I don't think I could get another remote with out a backlight.

That's a bit premature as nobody knows what it actually looks like:

"we don't have any real pictures of the unit quite yet."

I suppose if it were redesigned 100%, so it looked and functioned nothing like what has been shown and announced, then it might merit re-evaluation.

My comments are based of course on the press coverage and what the renders look like. Everything leads us to believe what was shown is what's being produced.

To me, it might as well have been designed by Zenith back in the 1970's. Before anyone knew anything about the kinds of devices we'd be controlling today. It doesn't seem like they've taken any queues or learned anything from any other products that have come before it.

Anyway, just don't buy it because I'm working on something and you should all help to promote my product in the future.

If yours turns out to be anything like the Boxee remote, except backlit, then things could get very interesting.

Nothing like the Boxee remote, but that's a good thing. BTW, after having used the Boxee remote for a few months, I can tell you that it only looks good on screen in photo layouts. It sucks to use the top side almost as bad as it sucks to use the keyboard (and that's pretty bad).

I'm still in relatively early stages, having had a bit of a setback because a particular manufacturer I was in talks with to produce a few other projects, turns out can't handle this particular design. So now I'm in the process of reaching out to other contract manufacturers and parts suppliers (to confirm whether a few ideas are viable).

BTW, if anyone has any tips/recommendations or contract manufacturers they can recommend I contact, send me a PM. I'm concentrating on China/Taiwan and Korea at the moment.

I'd imagine Hugo would know of a couple, but they're likely staying pretty busy these days.

Well, I would hazard a guess that Foxconn would be far too large a partner for my company to work with. I don't think I'm going to be doing volume measured in millions. One can dream though, so maybe one day.

I'm in a bit of a quandary right now because of this, as I'd prefer to deal with one manufacturer rather than have the one I'm in contact with now start on some parts and then have to go to someone else for the other product. Especially since that product and another simpler product would share some molds.

Especially since it would also mean splitting my limited capital instead of using it for a better position/favor with one company. I'm contemplating going the Kickstarter route for one or more products, but I still have a lot to consider about that. If nothing else, it seems like a decent way to potentially get some publicity, which is what I think some other projects have been using it for.

Well no worries. Regardless of who in that region you end up going with, the knock-offs will be on DX.com for $10 (shipping included!) within a few weeks of it.

Cheers

Any idea which manufacturing/prototype company(s) Intrigue Technologies worked with in the early days of the Harmony Remote?

You might be able to connect with someone from Intrigue since they are 'local' to you.

I did have a chance to talk to someone from there back in 2005, but unfortunately I didn't keep in touch. It'd be kind of sneaky to probe for that kind of info though, wouldn't it?

The early Harmony stuff was pretty basic in construction and I'm sure the couple of companies I've dealt with over the past couple of years could both pull something like that off. I'd probably need to go to the same type of place that Logitech has producing their stuff now. Not necessarily their remotes though.

So true, on the same note it must be impossible to purchase a genuine jlink (jtag/swd device) in china because every factory over there appears to be knocking out bootlegs left right and centre. The situation is so bad for segger that they've had to introduce "serial number" checks in order to access the latest software, this appears to be their only form of security now! oh dear.

I don't want to link to engadget, so you'll have to click-through yourself.
http://www.xbmcfreak.nl/en/sigma-ultra-thin-set-top-box/

Ain't technology grand?

That's not so much ultra "thin" as it is just plain old tiny.

Yeah, I'm astonished that this thing will be able to do everything it says. I'll be curious if it works as well as people are hoping. I have my doubts.

Everything lives on a single chip. The last SageTV Extender, also based on a Sigma SoC, was just about equally tiny. Nearly half the size of my previous generation extender, which was itself already small enough.