Boxee Box Owner's Thread - Reviews, tips, tricks, bugs and feature requests - Page 2

Let me go grab that universal I bought with the keyboard ...

Until the press event tonight, with it's announcement of streaming partners/apps, the whining will not stop.

What's the challenge? Boxee (via IR) just takes the same kind of discrete codes used by the PC software, doesn't it? left, right, up, down, enter, backspace, page up, page down, etc. Very similar to media center.

I'll have to dig up one of my old USB IR receivers to see if it will work with the Boxee Box.

@Aaron, I'll be up and running on it before Christmas. Maybe this weekend.

My boxee box just got delivered. I'm in Hawaii, too so.

Well, I just set up my Box, and overall I'm not that impressed.

Firstly, my fan is definitely audible, with a slow whirring sound as if it's a bad fan (which it maybe). I'm sure I wouldn't be able to hear it during movie watching but just browsing through menus, etc, it's there.

2nd, the menu's just aren't that snappy. I was expecting something like the PC Boxee app in smoothness, but it just isn't there on the Box.

3rd, streaming MKV's over a wired connection required a few seconds of buffering, something that my dedicated HTPC with XBMC Live doesn't have to do half as long.

I'm going to give the Boxee team some time to get it updated, and hopefully 1.0 out tonight will solve some speed issues.

Hum... I think my box is already not working anymore...
Was watching some content over Youtube in HD and then freeze... No more nothing...
Tried to restart (even in 'restauration' mode) and now I have no more video (or sound)...

So far here is my take, and I am reserving any/all judgement and review until 1.0 comes out. This is merely a quick take.

1. Menu's can be a bit choppy at times, but not horrible, definitely noticeable.

2. This thing has a fan? If I put my ear right to it, I can barely hear it. When playback of 1080p content (Avatar BD ISO) I have absolutely no audible noise, this is with audio muted, from 5 feet away. Fan = Non-issue.

3. Playback: Played everything I have thrown at it without a single hitch. Yes, there is a slight buffer time on video playback, but its rather quick. 40GB m2ts files buffer within a second.

4. Heat. After watching a 3 hour 1080p BD, I felt the box and while it was warm, it was not close to hot. I can handle that.

5. Standby power-on time is pretty much instant, and I don't notice my power fluctuating leaving it in standby..

6. Interface currently is identical to the latest released PC build. I'm sure things will change immensely with the 1.0 release. Amazon beat these out the door a day earlier than Boxee had anticipated, thus the reason 1.0 was not available yet.

All-in-all, it's a solid streamer right now, and I figure it will be even better with the 1.0 update. Netflix, Hulu down the road soon and a full HTML5 webkit browser. Good stuff.

As per my post in the anticipation thread, I'd love to know how it handles files with 5.1 aac audio; specifically, can it output that as 5.1 pcm?

If anyone could test this I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

You will definitely find that in our review, but that will be within the next 5 - 7 days. (Just in case no one else responds to your question.)

For me, 1080p bd rips made with makemkv are unwatchable, always buffering and skipping. The boxee box is wired to my network. Those same rips plays perfectly with Boxee on my macbook pro over wifi.

As for fan noise, It's barely audible, you really have to focus on it to hear it when it's quiet. Quieter than my 360 slim for sure.

As of now, I had 2 crash with the box that needed a reboot.

Awesome thanks jakmal. Looking forward to the review.

So I have a kill-a-watt power measuring device and I measured how much power the boxee box was using.. it uses 15 watts when booting up, 15 watts when idling in a menu, 15 watts when playing a 720p mkv file and 15 watts when on standby mode :P
So far I'm satisfied with the boxee box.. except some 1080p mkv files make it reboot the UI. It's sort of like how explorer.exe crashes sometimes in windows.. it restarts itself right away.. but it seems to happen every time on the same files at the same positions. I'm optimistic this will be fixed by 1.0 when it updates tomorrow.. If not, I'll be pretty upset, but I'll still keep teh boxee box. All I really wanted out of it was to be like a popcorn hour but have a good ui. The ui is pretty fast, not as fast as my core 2 duo HTPC but there's no annoying delays or anything. Also the fan is quiet, which was a relief to me.
update: the remote keyboard is REALLY nice.. you won't accidentally press any keys and so far I've typed in user/passes for three different network shares and it worked great


DSC01596 by the.uncola, on Flickr

I will reserve judgement on speed until it finished scraping. part of the issue some might be seeing like me is that its busy scraping in the background and the CPU and I/O are already being utilized. BD rips were playing back fine (which are highly HW assisted) regular ole DVD playback is very slow which I hope will disapear when scraping is done.

Good News:
Setup was easy
overscan setup is easy and done well for both simple and advanced
HTPC keyboard and mouse plugged in and worked fine
talking to my readyNAS no issues
Got DTS-MA to Bitstream
haven't crashed or hung it yet

Bad News:
no netflix
no youtube?
no hulu?
TrueHD BD rip plays back with AC-3 not TrueHD
the keyboard is very very difficult to use in low light
fancast.com videos did not load at all

have not tried my USB IR dongle and my harmony yet

Sean

so how do you launch the browser?

Sean

mine has 0.9.2.1.something or other on it. not 1.0

hopefully it will get 1.0 tommorow.

Sean

I'm not sure it's available in the pre-1.0 version.

yeah I was looking for my kill-a-watt earlier but couldn't find it. need to find it in the day light.

and I agree on the fan. it does have a fan buts is pretty damn quiet. lately I'm more annoyded but the HD noise on my 1TB drives in my DVR more than anything. nowhere near as loud as an xbox or ps3. I'm sure it will ire some folks but I think most should find it tolerable.

Sean

Can anyone comment on the range of the remote?

My current setup has a bare wall with the TV mounted, which means the equipment is downstairs below. IR transmitter works for everything else, but obviously won't for boxee. I have my doubts that the small battery in this remote will power the signal through a floor.

I just picked one up from futureshop.
Waiting for is scan my media folders
I will post more as I test a few high bit rate files in mkv, iso, m2ts, etc.....

My buddy bought one local and I went over his house. Any small type video file played ok. Any high bit rate type file skipped and chopped too much. Even crashed the unit a couple of times. Since I would never pay for a pay service like Netflix or Hulu this isn't a box for me, but I still don't think anything special about it. Good luck with yours.

do the new 3tb harddrives work on the bb?

Why not wait for the official firmware before casting it aside?

Boy-what a bunch of crybabies-if it isn't perfect it's no good-this isn't a Popbox ya know.

The coin-cell battery will not be a problem.

An IR transmitter needs a boat-load more energy than an RF transmitter. When transmitting, it is about 30 milliamp for IR as opposed to about less than a milliamp for RF. The transmit time is also much shorter for RF, tens of microseconds for RF as opposed to many milliseconds for IR.

One of the advantages of RF is how frugal it can be with battery-power.

well my scraping is finished now. I tested a few files and watched cpu, never got more that 60% with nothing queing, no scraping, no other activities in the background.

Will post tomorrow after I Do some more testing.

Tee hee! Good luck with *that*