Just Gave In And Purchased A Boxee.....

[Masbango]

Boxee Box has around of 202 apps. The majority of this apps are available in Europe. Apps like MUBI, Grooveshark and Youtube are available in Europe.

What I have noticed is that the reviews about Boxee Box made by Americans where negative simply because Netflix, Hulu, Vudo and such streaming services was not available. European reviews where more positive, but they concentrated primarily on file support simply because we in Europe has no streaming services.

A good and balanced review of Boxee Box can be found on AnandTech. Be aware that this review is based on the old firmware.

AnandTech review points the following good points:

1. High quality re-encoded non-DRM videos from non-streaming Internet sources play back without issues. Most commonly in the MKV or AVI format, with H264 / MPEG4 video and DTS / AC3 / AAC audio tracks, the Boxee Box is able to handle anything thrown at it in this department with aplomb.
2. Streams for which hardware acceleration is not supported (such as RMVB) are decoded on the host CPU (Atom)
3. MPEG-4 decoding has no problems with Q-Pel and Global Motion Compensation (GMC) with multiple warp points. This is one aspect with which streamers based on Sigma Designs and Realtek SoCs have problems.


My prime requirement to by Boxee was that it included a Webkit browser with Flash 10.1 support. This works well without crashing after the last firmware update. The only problem is with the old Flash On2VP6 codec used at the RTVE website (http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/). Old series on this Spanish television website are encoded using H.263 coded and Boxee cannot decode this without stuttering and losing audio and video sync.

[dbone1026]

One of the biggest gripes from the HD Audio crowd is that the Boxee Box still suffers HD Audio dropouts when bitstreaming HD Audio. Also, due to licensing if you want the Boxee Box to downmix or decode it will send out as 2ch stereo. I believe also the latest firmware has caused additional instabilities with streaming and buffering, but I need to update mine and do some further testing.

[maddog]

Well to update..........

Boxee box has been sold - got fed up of a lot of the web content refusing to play all the time

Finally sold my A-100 (£35)

Got XBMC up and running and have to admit I've barely used my C-200 since, but the wife still uses it as she loves the simplicity of it

I'm getting an Apple TV with XBMC to go in the bedroom now