Boxee Box vs New PCH A210 - need advice - Page 6

Your opinion-not mine either!

No sir! I used at least 8 HD media players previously, and I really like Boxee Box over all of them. It is a great HD media player for both worlds. I watched Transformer and Avatar on the Boxee Box using home network today. I encountered zero hiccups on both movies. The QWERTY Boxee Box remote is very useful too, and I can use my Android phone for Boxee Box remote as well.

I keep hearing several complain for several Boxee Box owners in here about Boxee Box fan noise. I'm I missing something, because I can not hear the fan noise from my Boxee Box. I can hear fan noises from pre-amp, A/V receiver and other devices than anything out of Boxee Box.

Fan noise is subjective. I went through three Boxee Boxes and I could hear the fan noise. Some were louder than others. The problem is once you notice it then it becomes hard to tune out. If you don't hear it then that's great for you. You have a small fan in a small enclosure. The fan is not a high quality fan. It's something that should not be present in a diskless box. I suspect they will get rid of it eventually. Don't forget it wasn't supposed to be there in the original design. The fan was very similar to that of the Patriot Box Office. It wasn't as annoying as the one in the A200. I guess you got lucky.

philip

The "king" of HD Media Players will always be subjective to each person, so you can't expect to ask the "which one is better" question and get a universal answer. For my setup I have a Boxee Box, 2 Dunes, and 2 PCHs. The Boxee Box is the only one that does not get turned on. This does not mean it is a bad player, but strictly for my setup the PCH/Dune are much better solutions. In particular for me what keeps me from becoming a Boxee Box fanboy:

1) I don't particularly care for online content. If this was important to me then I would definitely feel different about the Boxee Box, but for now it is just a bunch of noise

2) I actually don't like the UI and how unintuitive navigating around is

3) The remote is quite possibly the worst remote I have ever come across. Not backlit, lack of logical buttons, stupid design that makes you think you are holding it correct even if it is upside down...

4) HD Audio dropouts. Plain and simple, when I have players in my house where I have zero audio dropouts, why would I instead want to use a player that can't do this perfectly. I know some people will say that there are only minimal dropouts or simply drop down to core audio, but for me there is no reason to make a sacrifice or work around.

5) The Boxee Box has its own jukebox that is managed from each Boxee Box. Fort me this causes two inconveniences vs 3rd party jukeboxes available on the Dune/PCH. First, I generally add content to my library (movies/tv shows) remotely. With the Dune/PCH 3rd party jukeboxes I can then push though the new media remotely so the moment my wife turns on the player the new content is waiting for her. With the Boxee Box I need to hope that when she goes to use it just did a scan and captured the new content. Second, with a 3rd party jukebox on the Dune/PCH i am managing a central jukebox, so I have assurance that when having multiple players in the house they all will have the same jukebox/content. With the Boxee Box not only do you have to manage the jukebox from the Boxee Box, but if you have multiple Boxee Boxes you now need to manage multiple jukeboxes

As I mentioned, the items above are purely for my setup and are the reasons why the Boxee Box collects dust (although maybe with the design the dust just slides off ), but this does not in any way mean that for the next person the Boxee Box isn't the best player for them.

However, all these media players are moot anyhow since we just learned in this thread that the King of all HD Media players, the Iomega TV, is coming out at some point in some month in some year

Why don't you just declare yourself a "Boxee Booster"?

Damian,

Just a couple of notes.

Boxee will very soon fully support NFO files, which means that if you dump and re-scrape your library on all of your Boxee Boxes, they will all build an identical media wall based on the NFO files, folder.jpg and other information that is in your various media shares.

Another advantage of Boxee is that it can aggregate media from numerous media sources and present them in one view, without any extra effort on the part of the user... so, for example, if you have two or three media share sources that contain movies, Boxee will figure this out and automatically combine all movie titles onto the movie wall.

The biggest problem with Boxee right now, from my perspective is their inability to fix the lossless audio problems. We will have to see if they can get that nailed down later this year.

The weather here was crappy so my wife and I watched several movies on the Boxee Box and honestly it was a much more enjoyable experience for us than watching three movies on the A200.

Why? Well, the OSD on the Boxee is nicer, navigation is faster, and one of the movies that we watched was on VUDU. So we watched a local source movie, which gave us a hankering to watch the sequel which I don't have, so we watched that on VUDU, then we watched another locally sourced movie.

We did all of this with no hiccups and no fuss.

Everyone has their own opinion of what makes a media player "good". If the extent of someone's criteria is error free playback and they don't mind a slow clunky player with a cryptic interface, then the A210 is a great machine!

Jason,

I figured talking about Boxee Box couldn't go on much longer without you coming on board

Correct, nfo support will eventually be on the Boxee Box, I was simply stating on the current state which just doesn't work for me.

I don't know what to think about the lossless audio problem. It is most likely Intel related, so you never know how serious or intent Intel is on fixing the problem, and anyone who knows the lossless audio problems the PCH had because of Syabas understands that being held hostage to a 3rd party can drastically delay things.

Some people will think the Boxee Box is great, some will think it sucks, some will think it is somewhere in the middle ( I am the middle guy). Every player has its pros and cons, there is no perfect player, nor will there ever be. I expect that over time you will see more of these media players start to converge and become more identical (maybe the porting of XBMC over to Sigma will do this?). The biggest asset Boxee Box has is online content. If online content doesn't matter to you then IMO a big advantage is lost. What will be interesting will be seeing how the other manufacturers are able to respond to Boxee in the coming year as I think at some point it will almost be a requirement for these players to all have premium online content

No Sir! I never attach to any HD media player, and I owned so many of them. I never declared myself to any HD media player. As I said, every player has its hiccups.

For you, you already declared yourself below:


Your opinion-not mine. I had a BB for 2 days and couldn't send it back to amazon fast enough. My A210 blows the BB out of the water hands down.>

Actually to me, personally, the biggest asset that the Boxee has is that it does an excellent job of scraping, etc, without me having to manage a media jukebox. With full NFO support this will be 100% the case.

2nd biggest asset is the modern UI and very fast navigation.

3rd biggest asset (for me) is online content access, which is a big plus.

If 1 and 2 worked for me I would have kept it.

In my case boxee never manages to scrape my ~700 movies. The most I ever get is 120. XBMC and YAMJ scrape these just fine...

that and I when I open the view with covers it takes on the order of 5 minutes to render all the covers....

If they fix the scraping, support NFO's and get some sort of thumbnail caching working then it would be usable for me.

Music support is even slower although it did succesfully scrape the music library.

Obviously lots of folks are having lots of different experiences. Another sign of immature and non robust software.

The potential is certainly there and I wish them the best. I really dont want o have PCH's but for now and the past few years they at least work where others have failed...

Nice to have accurate scraping, reasonable speed and be able to watch a movie with 0 glitches in the audio or the video.

Sean

For most of us, we cannot afford to spend $200 for HD media player to have it stay off. In your case; if it is off, you shouldn't hear any noise!

Is there anyone on this thread that can confirm that the Boxee Box by D-Link can stream/playback a High Bitrate MKV or Blu-Ray ISO Movie file with zero stutters or lag for the whole duration of the Movie via ethernet cable connection = I'm talking about 20GB+ and 30GB+ movie files... NOT 1080P 10GB or smaller files...

Because the last time I had the Boxee Box back in December, it kept stuttering and lagging and even froze when I tried to play those large high bitrate files making it unwatchable because it look like a super slow motion movie that made a 2hour movie play for 4hours!- which is why I returned it... I was wondering if they fixed it by now or improved...

My brother's PCH-A200/210 never had issues with large high bitrate file playback via ethernet no matter what size they are! My Fusion HD only stutters three to four times during a whole 2hour movie when playing back 30GB+ movies.

I only rip full BD ISOs, I never shrink or extract just the movie. I've not had any stutters or lags, but i will get four or five .5 to 1 second audio dropouts from the Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA audio during a 100 minute movie. Otherwise with highbitrate BD ISOs I don't have any problems. Now I did have one title that did have numerous dropouts which did not occur on my C200 or PopBox, so problems like that might also be title dependent.

Supposedly the audio dropout problem has been fixed with the coming firmware. But we will have to wait and see. But for me, with only four or five short duration dropouts I can live with it. With the current firmware if you switch to the legacy audio there are zero dropouts.(Which I refuse to do)

If the dropouts were more numerous or for longer durations I would be using my C200 or last remaining PopBox instead. But with other things the Boxee Box offers me over the other players it is the device I am using the most of now. Even more than my TiVos. Once the Boxee Box gets a few more features, like Hulu+ and Amazon VOD(no idea if Amazon is coming) my TiVos will be mostly relegated to doing what they did ten years ago. Just recording TV for me.

Thank-you for confirming! Since I bought a NAS I am only ripping full Blu-Ray ISOs too - mainly for the HD audio and Chinese Subtitles (so I don't have to sit there and translate the movies for my parents)....

I can further verify what Aaron is reporting. I have a modest size library but I have not had any playback problems with Boxee on a wired LAN other than the previously mentioned HD audio dropouts which are rather short and might occur half a dozen times in a two hour film. This can be circumvented by disabling HD audio until Boxee gets this sorted.

I have one BD title that had bizarre issues with playback on Boxee. This title is Crank and I believe it has some authoring/codec issues.

Wow that made no sense, what did noise have anything to do with my comments???

I love how people complain about a $200 media player and being able to afford yet have no problem dropping hundreds/thousands of dollars on home equipment, hard drives for storage, discs (assuming you are actually buying the movies you are ripping), etc... I do understand everyone has different budgets, but last time I checked this was not a cheap hobby

I'm not sure what you meant by noise either. I assumed you referred to Boxee Box fan noise. In one sentence on reply#154 you said; “your Boxee Box is the only one that does not get turned on” and another sentence you said; "for now it is just a bunch of noise".

Sorry, I can say this about myself- I don't have hundreds/thousands of dollars to spend on home entertainment. I usually sold or traded the existing devices before I upgrade to another one. I have never bought any home entertainment device for more than a thousand dollar. If the new brand, model and options that I wanted are too expensive, I bought the refurbish model instead.

I played several movies using blu-ray native m2ts files without rebuff, but it had several "very brief audio dropout. Since it was very quick dropout each time, I barely notice it and it doesn't bother me". I was told that it'll be fixed in the next firmware update in May.

The problem with the audio glitch is that they have claimed to have fixed this now several times and several times its not really fixed so they have 0 credibility in my book based on this and a number of other issues...

All these folks should be ashamed of themselves for releasing sub standard products. I could never work at a place like that.

My HD-300 should be here this week. Lets see if Native mode really works... I'm looking forward to see if the Sage is as is good as its users claim.

Sean

This is a very good example of why the Boxee Box is an interesting media player. It is quite unique though, but certainly an experience which is a big plus for the Boxee approach. It seems to me that the more common experience is to have to deal with the mixing of net and local content, with the net consisting mainly of junk.

philip

One thing that is frustrating about Boxee Box is poor playback of hi-def camcorder files. Otherwise, I really like it. Last night, I tried to play 1080p/60 m2ts files taken straight from my new Sony DSC-HX9V camera and put on a USB stick, and the video & audio were out of synch. Also, even from USB, Boxee had trouble keeping up with the bitrate (24mbps). The same videos played smoothly from a WD TV Live unit & also from SageTV HD300. Boxee has had trouble playing my other 1080i/60 AVCHD videos as well. The 720p/60 play fine.

I have a couple stand alone WD Live NAS drives that I use, that can easily toted to someone else's network and simply plugged in. The reason I like the NAS approach is that I can get much better transfer rates when writing to those drives via my gigabit network setup.

As for the dropouts, I hadn't had too many issues with them until yesterday. I picked up Shrek Forever After on BluRay, which is TrueHD 7.1 and ripped it via MakeMKV to a 1:1 mkv file. Played it on the Boxee and has all sorts of issues with the audio. I know the TrueHD bitstreaming is bad on the Boxee(get no sound at all) so I have the option that my receiver is TrueHD compatible turned off. This usually results in acceptable results with my Onkyo 701. However with Shrek, the sound started, then would drop out and STAY OUT. If I stopped the movie and restarted, it would last for 5-10 seconds then drop out and stay out again. I had to switch to 5.1 to be able to watch the movie. Playing the actual BluRay was fine.

This is the first time this has happened, but this is a LOT more serious than a half second drop out.

As for the A-200, I am having a strange stuttering issue. I have all my DVDs(not BluRays) stored on a WD Live 2TB standalone NAS drive. Sometimes(it happens maybe 50% of the time) when I start a DVD from that drive, the movie stutters initially. If I do a quick pause and wait a few seconds then start it, it is absolutely fine. I DON'T have this issue on the Boxee. I don't know why this sometimes occurs with the A-200 as the drive is perfectly fine according to diagnostics and surface scans.

If you look at the comment I made I was talking about online content not being important to me, so seeing online content adverts on the main home screen or elsewhere is just extra noise to me. I wasn't talking about the fan

Wasn't trying to be difficult, your statement said "For most of us" which meant you were talking on behalf of, well, most of us If you read around AVS you do get a sense that many people here are spending a lot of money on their setup, so a $179 media player rarely makes up the lions share of the total cost. I am not talking about blindly throwing around money, but for better or worse this is an expensive hobby.

Okay, I'm not sure what online contents have anything to do with noise either.

I don't see online content as distraction. It's a plus to have the option to watch movies and other online contents on Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, ReviSion, etc. I enjoy movie on Vudu HDx the most and it is probably the best streaming ever. My kids love their Toy Story 3 and other animation contents on Netflix too. It is very convenience to have these contents available on Boxee Box and PS3 online streaming.
Again, Boxee Box is not perfect and it will never be, and I can say the same thing to all the previous players that I used to own too. One way or another, all the HD media players have quirks and hiccups. I hope that the scheduled firmware update in May will make Boxee Box better!

When I said for most of us, I meant most of us around the world. I think that my statement is still hold true for most of us (Americans and people around the world). We cannot afford to buy $200 HD media player to have it collecting dust. If it doesn't work, we'll return it and find a replacement for it.

You are taking things way too literal

I have no need to see any of the online content adverts in the main menu. I would love the option to shut that stuff off as I have no need to see. Just a personal opinion for my setup. Not saying it isn't useful for others who want online content, just something I don't need to see.

A large majority or Americans/people around the world are not hanging out on AVS, setting up home servers, ripping/streaming, etc... My comment in no way is meant to generalize the entire world, that would just be silly. Once again though we are talking about this hobby and who the typical person who participates in this hobby (where $200 has quite a different meaning since this hobby is expensive). I do like how you are now talking on behalf of the rest of the world though