http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/ Switched Comments for Boxee Sits Comfortably Atop the Media Center Hill http://www.switched.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.switched.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
do yourself a favour and just buy an acer revo 3610 (now available for $299 canadian from futureshop/best buy) as your media player. in march, there will be a machine running for $249 as well. you will be able to run boxee, xbmc, whichever media front-end you want as well as using it for tons of other things (torrenting, etc etc).

this thing is not worth the estimated $199 price tag.]]>Jan 26th 2010 12:55PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/The review above is not of the Boxee Box, which is what we assume you're referring to when you note a $199 price tag, but merely the Beta software which will run on any PC. As noted it is still in beta meaning it is not consumer ready yet. However considering the box will be significantly cheaper than any nettop, including the Revo, and likely handle hi-def video better, it seems like a perfectly reasonable deal. Though we're reserving judgment till we get a proper hands-on with the device.
]]>Jan 26th 2010 1:47PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/Jan 26th 2010 1:04PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/You're correct in stating that Netflix uses Silverlight which would explain the lack of Linux compatibility. But seeing as how both Roku, and we expect the Boxee Box, are capable of streaming Netflix, and running Linux it is clear that the hurdles are not purely technical. Netflix is preventing streaming to Linux based PCs for some reason (likely DRM issues) that has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of either Linux or the Moonlight plug in.

If issue is purely Netflix's choice of Silverlight, then we have two questions that remain unanswered.
1. How does streaming work on Roku and the Boxee Box?
2. Why choose Silverlight over the platform agnostic Flash?]]>Jan 26th 2010 1:12PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
in that case, i have several more issues with boxee (just the software).

-terrible scraping of tv shows/movies. at the moment you are supposed to submit erroneous scrapes to an online spreadsheet for boxee admins to fix. other xbmc players do this 100x better (plex, xbmc itself).

-boxee treats you like an idiot. it doesn't inform you of anything going on. you have no idea when it actually scans your sources, when its done, whether its doing it at all.

-the built-in browser is basically unusable. no idea how its based on firefox at all since it can barely render a website properly let alone actually let you click on links etc.

-for some reason, boxee beta lists EVERY single episode you have of a specific show in a single list, regardless of what season it is. makes absolutely no sense to me. other media players (xbmc, plex) allow much better control of how things are displayed as they both offer you several different 'views' of your content.

-zero control of how you want boxee to act. for some reason it just throws random internet hulu/nbc etc content right into your list of local files, making it seem like you actually have these available to watch. there seems to be no way to turn this off, nevermind the fact that hulu isn't even available in my country (and the geo-specific setting in boxee, surprise surprise, does not even work)

i am all for beta software and i understand there will be issues. the main reason i even tried out boxee was because i was interested in the boxee box hardware. boy was i completely blown away at how completely 'pre-alpha' the software felt compared to xbmc and plex.

the commercial boxee box hardware is supposedly going to go on sale in the next few months. i find this completely unfathomable at how this is supposedly going to happen. its also going to rely on not-so-stable flash beta 10 plugin to play content smoothly as well. dear lord...]]>Jan 26th 2010 1:25PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/We're not saying that Boxee is without faults, as I stated above, I've adopted it as my TV watching platform, but I'm admittedly adventurous and have no problem using true beta (or even) alpha quality software.

But some of your criticisms are misguided.
"-for some reason, boxee beta lists EVERY single episode you have of a specific show in a single list, regardless of what season it is."
Not true, if properly tagged your shows are broken up by season. Though it is true that is all presented in a single column view.

"-zero control of how you want boxee to act. for some reason it just throws random internet hulu/nbc etc content right into your list of local files, making it seem like you actually have these available to watch."
Again not true. Boxee only adds streaming shows your "my shows" list if you tell it to. Otherwise streaming is relegated to the Library, which is in our opinion one of the great features of Boxee since Hulu, NBC, etc are all in one place rather than navigating to different sites/apps.

"-boxee treats you like an idiot. it doesn't inform you of anything going on. you have no idea when it actually scans your sources, when its done, whether its doing it at all. "
Ok, that I agree with. I do find the lack of information about scanning sources frustrating. However, I will say that Boxee is not aimed at people interested in how their media center works, they just want it to do what its supposed to with minimal intrusion -- they may have taken that concept a bit far in some cases though.

Also know that we're not saying Boxee is the end all be all of media centers, just that it's (subjectively) the best we've tested. WMC, Front Row, XMBC, feel incomplete by comparison, even gimmicky in some cases. They're not aimed at your average consumer -- especially not XBMC. Boxee is the first media center product we've seen that hits all the right notes, even if it's a bit out of tune.]]>Jan 26th 2010 1:48PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
Written by a disappointed Boxee (alpha) enthusiast.]]>Jan 26th 2010 2:26PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
However, after a few minutes of using it, I found it to be aggrevating and less intuitive. Nonetheless, I could make due with that...if I hadn't started receiving video interrupting errors every few minutes, regardless of what service I was using (local video, Hulu, MTV, etc.). On top of this, I've since been having problems with my Apple Remote, and I don't just mean in Boxee. It's as if Boxee broke support for it. I used a third-party solution to restore its functionality (thank you, Candelair!), but it would only work until I ran Boxee again, and then it killed the remote system-wide.

The final straw, for me, was when I went to use Netflix, which had worked just fine in alpha, and found that no matter what video I picked, I received an error telling me that playback had failed, and it refused to play. I upgraded my Silverlight runtime, checked in the browser, checked various forums (official and otherwise), but there seemed to be no solution.

So in the end, I ended up downloading Plex for the first time, and now I'm wondering why I hadn't checked this out sooner. The interface is attractive and intuitive, Netflix works, I've had no strange errors, and my remote is still functioning. Plex still doesn't have the third-party support that Boxee has, but maybe if it could get even half the hype that Boxee is getting, it would.]]>Jan 26th 2010 2:57PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/Jan 26th 2010 3:55PMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
If I could get Boxee to, I don't know, play one movie before forcing me to reboot maybe I'd reconsider. I ended up just using the "media center" PC for miro and hulu desktop.]]>Jan 27th 2010 6:25AMhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/http://www.switched.com/2010/01/26/boxee-sits-comfortably-atop-the-media-center-hill/
My series, movies, podcast and the videos I find on the web that I mark with the bookmarklet are all watched using Boxee. There are some kinks, but I've found that in my configuration is rock solid

To all of the people with problems above I recommend that you trash your preferences and the boxee application support folder and install again: this has solved any problem I may have had before. Remember that this is Beta software.

To the person with the remote problem: this happened to me and had to do with Snow Leopard, not with Boxee. Here is the free solution:

http://www.iospirit.com/labs/candelair/

The forum is great to get help as is writing to @boxee_help: this people truly deliver

The new beta is great, the only thing I always change is the background.

I have a tutorial on how to do this–named Boxee Bokeh– and a great selection of free pictures in the boxee forum:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=14905

I also made a flickr group to show you pictures of how it looks and links to good pictures to download.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/boxeebokeh/



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