The Boxee Box has to be one of the most anticipated pieces of home-cinema hardware in recent years. It brings the social media system Boxee together with some stylish hardware from D-Link to produce a set-top box that pipes movies, music and apps to your TV in magnificent style.
Since it was announced -- and demoed at CES this year -- the guts of the Boxee have changed considerably. Initially an Nvidia Tegra 2 was going to be running the show, but it was found to be unable to process high-quality H.264 video. Now it's an Intel Atom chip on board, which leads to some interesting questions over what else you could use the hardware for, were you a fan of hacking things.
You may notice that the surface of the Boxee is no longer a gigantic fingerprint magnet mirror. Also missing is the second USB socket on the front underside of the box, but there are two sockets on the rear now.
With Apple TV almost certain to add apps at some point and Google TV entering this market it's no surprise the Boxee has lots of plug-in options for making it more impressive. In our demo, we saw a YouTube app, as well as features that allow the Boxee to grab video from on-demand TV services such as BBC iPlayer.
Video playback looked good to us, but we'll reserve judgment until we see one up and running in our test environment. We adore the idea of having a much more graphical user interface for our video files, and we think this could make finding stuff to watch much easier. We're also excited by the options for online catch-up services. In a way, this could be a much more useful version of YouView, with access to much of the same content but far better media-streaming options.
The box will cost an anticipated £200 in the UK, although we're told that's a promotional price, and could well rise after an initial discount period. It's interesting to note that the US price is $200, leading us to complain once again that someone besides George Osbourne is having a laugh at our literal expense. That aside, have a good click through our hands-on photos and see what's what with the Boxee Box.
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Comments 5
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Anonymous 4 October, 2010 17:40
Caption on the remote, "he remote uses RF to control the Boxee Box, but aside from that, is pretty unremarkable..."
I believe this remote has a full keyboard on the otherside of it, which actually makes it pretty remarkable.
Ian Morris 4 October, 2010 17:52
...and if you'd clicked through to the next slide, you would have seen that I wrote exactly that.
Anonymous 4 October, 2010 20:59
I have wanted the Boxee Box and so I installed the free one until this came out. Now I am having second thoughts about Boxee altogether . Why ? Because I joined Boxee forums as I had some questions I needed help with. i find I cannot post as I need to confirm my account with Boxee. I contacted a moderator and he told me that there was a Need to confirm . They never sent me a confirmation email. It also did not go into spam filter.
I requested another confirmation email be sent and I have never received it or heard from them since. I have requested another be sent two different times and I have never heard from them at all.
So , How can I pay for this box and not even get into the forums ? Until things change with me and Boxee forums , I will NOT recommend that anyone pay for this box.
Anonymous 5 October, 2010 03:36
Silence about partners besides Netflix is making me really nervous. There is nothing about Hulu and they REALLY need Amazon Unbox. Without the ability to rent tv shows and movies the Boxee box stands out as a neat but overpriced media console. There are plenty of those out there that do Netflix and for much cheaper.
Anonymous 10 October, 2010 21:20
I've got a few dollars hanging around. Any chance D-Link will offer me that exchange rate?