Thinking Outside The Boxee
The ‘Open Source Build Your Own Media Station’ world has seen many different incarnations of software to play back media, record TV, and access online content. Unfortunately, said incarnations have been a royal pain the arse to install. One flavour that is shaking things up is Boxee and it’s D-Link hardware Boxee Box. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge take apart the Boxee phenomenon and explore if it has legs to bring the video revolution to us all.
Of course, our shot is just the start of the conversation and we look to you lovely people to continue the discussion in the shot comments below. Does Boxee show promise? How do other DVR software projects compare? What is your experience of Boxee and similar hardware boxes? Where do you see the future of digital video? share your thoughts below…
58 Comments to “Thinking Outside The Boxee”
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Love XBMC, been using it for years on a pair of Xboxes. Boxee is still on my to do list. Love the Boxee box, it looks stunning in the picture, BUT not sure how it’s going to look in the TV cabinet, with Xbox, Sat box, Tivo, Wii, etc… Not good I suspect…
I would have thought it would look sweet in the TV cabinet.
Mind you, it is not a conventional shape.
It’ll look great! Just put it on top so you don’t have gear sliding off it’s top
This comment isn’t really about Boxee, it’s more about the “App Store” model of software distribution. Firstly, I think it’s a Good Thing, it makes getting software easier for a user to get all the software they want with a minimum of fuss. The success of the iPhone’s third-party software is testament to this.
What I don’t understand is why this didn’t come about sooner? APT/Yum (and their related GUIs) on Linux have provided these centralised repositories of software for years, yet for a long time every article and discussion about software management on Linux said “we need setup.exe”. Now it seems that the paradigm has shifted somewhat.
Is there something significantly different about the new-generation “app stores” that we’re seeing on the Wii/iPhone/Boxee/etc. that make them more acceptable, or did it just take a device with the market penetration of the iPhone to make people see the light?
I think you’re right on the latter point; the iPhone made the concept of a centralised app store viable. It was obviously always possible with apt/yum repositories, but apps weren’t presented in that way. Certainly Ubuntu have made some steps towards this with the Software Centre, and SuSE have always had YaST, but until the iPhone came along it was a half-hearted approach — since the idea has now been sold to people, it’s been picked up a lot more.
I agree, but I think this is a common theme with Open Source. In many cases we are fantastic at building the infrastructure, but not at pulling together the strings and presenting it to users.
Now more than ever do we have the opportunity to think of new ways of doing things with so much technology at our finger tips.
This is the first time I hear about Boxee but it sounds freaking awesome
.. and you have to admit Boxee Box is such a cool name 
..
Stop calling my lovely dammit! I’m not a lovely person!!!
The Boxee box does look cool, particularly as it comes with a decent looking RF remote, so you can hide it if you want. It will, of course, depend very much on the price.
The other problem I have is that I do still like to record stuff from TV, and boxee (AFAICT) just doesn’t do it. Which means that, lovely as the boxee box is, I still need to have a myth box setup somewhere.
This is where Sky+, BT Vision and Virgin have gone – recordable and a library of online content. It needs to be both/and, IMHO.
I agree. Boxee with actual easy PVR functionality would be killer.
There is some way of getting Boxee to be able to access your myth recordings, but when I looked it was still fiddly.
I just installed a MythTV system last weekend – for over the air HD signals here in the U.S. Boxee can play them natively. The fiddly part is trying to run the scripts to rename them so they make sense, but for just playback it’s plug and play.
I am wondering whether you could combine a Boxee App and get_iplayer and http://linuxcentre.net/getiplayer/get_iplayer-pvr-manager... I need to read more about what Boxee Apps can do…
Do we know if this is in the Boxee roadmap?
This continues to be one request that we continually have and it is on our roadmap, but we first want to make sure that people can access as much online content as possible because online does a few things DVR doesn’t. - no need for HDD space, - no need to remember to record something, being – gives access to prior episodes of a show - ability to get content that you don’t have access to via your TV.
We view on-demand streaming video as an elegant solution and our real goal is to not only access everything that’s on the web now (50% of broadcast / 10% of cable), but to work with content providers to make it easy for the rest of their content to come to the web.
Andrew from Boxee
That “50% of broadcast” figure is pretty interesting. Where does that come from?
honestly I haven’t been able to track down the study, but I’ve heard it at a few conferences.
Interesting, so would you say it is a conscious decision to move away from broadcast TV, Andrew and instead embrace Internet delivered content?
Alas, it’s that otherwise unavailable cable content that keeps me (or more specifically, my wife) shackled to a cableco set-top box. The sooner HGTV and Food Network content breaks away from cableco’s, the sooner I can ditch the Motorola box (but I suppose it’s that Motorola box that’s currently funding HGTV productions, at the macro level).
totally – we love on-demand everything!
certainly there will be people who still want broadcast TV, but the eventual ability to place-shift and time-shift any content using Internet delivered content is awesome.
The Boxee remote is more then just neat – its fsckiing awesome with its full qwerty keyboard. Even if I don’t eventually get a Boxee box I’ll make sure that my my next TV media device has it.
Sounds awesome, but without capture I can’t see myself replacing my cheap (and very limited) Popcorn. Should be a very exciting project to lock out for.
“look” out for.
In my delusional dreams Tivo buys Boxee and I get an awesome all-in-one box. Someday.
Or…Boxee just builds in PVR functionality and we don’t get the risk of Tivo screwing Boxee.
I am very excited for the release of the Boxee Box. For quite a while I have been using my laptop to drive video on my 1080p HD tv via HDMI. I’ve ran boxee a few times to test it out and it’s really a great interface for getting at online content, music, and video. It will be great to have an actual set-top box so I don’t have to move the laptop around all the time. The $200 price point is also the perfect spot for a device like this.
That raises an interesting point – the Boxee box should be more competitive from a price point as the software is Open Source.
Mind you, I wonder how much extra development and hardware enablement was required on the hardware…
I doubt there was too much extra work done on the hardware as linux already supports a huge amount of hardware. The only extra work might have been making linux work with the Nvidia Tegra chipset. But with all the linux tablets coming out based on the Tegra chipset, I imagine Nvidia did most of that work themselves.
I use XBMC on a modded XBox and I’ve been playing with Boxee on my laptop for a few days. I love Boxee’s UI design, it’s very “social” and well thought out.
Can anyone actually point me towards the source code? I get the feeling some of it is proprietary, the development docs only talk about building apps.
I’d like a web interface so I can access my media from anywhere.
Source is all totally open. See http://boxee.tv/download, offered with the same level of publicity as the actual downloads (not hidden away in some footer somewhere).
If Boxee really is open source, I particularly like the business model of using open source software monetised through hardware sales and web services.
I’ve got a dual core Atom nettop with a Nvidia Ion GPU coming, from System76. When it gets here a day or two from now, I’ll be putting Ubuntu 9.10 + Boxee on it. The Boxee Box looks awesome, but it isn’t out yet, and does not have internal storage. My nettop is coming with a 1TB HDD for a personal movie collection.
+1 on DVR functionality in Boxee.
I guess I have one question for everyone about the boxee box. I have quite a few DVDs and is it possible to plug in an external USB dvd drive to the boxee box to watch DVDs? Is this possible with Boxee on the PC? I just can’t remember seeing anything in the menus for that.
DVDs become a menu option once you insert a DVD. The Boxee Box won’t have ether a DVD or HDD drive, but a few USB ports. One can attach a HDD to it, and it is running Linux, so I assume one could attach a USB DVD drive to it as well.
Cool! Well I’m definitely getting one, especially if they hold to that “under $200″ price point they talked about at CES. I’ve got an external DVD drive so I’ll try it out
Pcutler – You shouldn’t have to rename any mythtv recordings. Boxee can access the mythtv database and get the names from there. Search for Boxee and mythtv and you should find the proper URL to enter into Boxee.
I’ve been using Boxee for a while and finally built a dedicated HTPC running Ubuntu 9.10. I’m waiting for the Boxee Box so I can get one for each tv in the house. In the mean time, the beta has been causing some problems for me.
I’ve been having problems streaming from apps, but all local media seems to be working fine. I just read the global announcement, so I’ll be doing a fresh 9.10-64/Boxee Beta install this week.
One feature I haven’t looked for in Beta, and would really like to see, is music playlists. Is this supported, or on the roadmap?
I’m told that playlists are on the roadmap. As I understand it, Boxee will play m3u/pls playlists that it finds on the drive, but you can’t create or manage playlists throught the Boxee interface.
we’ve got a long way to go on the music experience – it’s something that’s on our roadmap to revamp by 2011. Ideally you’d be able to manage playlists, get new music, and find related web stuff for your collection.
I don’t think social is the killer-app for my tv viewing. I tried 3 different xbmc variants on my mac mini/htpc, XBMC, Boxee, and Plex. Currently, I prefer Plex, a simpler setup and interface. The ’social’ Boxee just seemed more cluttered to me.
Maybe it’s because my rl social circles weren’t on Boxee so I didn’t have anyone I really wanted to connect with on Boxee.
The main problem with relying on internet delivery for your content needs is that its only reasonably available in North America and large European countries.
The stupid and outdated idea of geographical limitations prevents users in Israel or Albania (just as an example) from viewing most online content. The relatively small audiences and the apparent need to have content accessible in the local language (through subtitling or dubbing) makes delivering geographically limited content to small or developing countries financially unfeasable.
Until people drop the stupid regioning logic, internet media remains viable only in three English speaking countries and internet-only devices will be just useless desk ornaments even in Boxee’s homeland.
Hear, hear!
I’m from The Netherlands and when I try to buy music downloads for Amazon for example it tells me:
“We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.”
Stuart mentioned BBC iPlayer and when I go there I get:
“Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only, but all BBC iPlayer Radio programmes are available to you.”
I go to Hulu and it tells me:
“Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States “
You gotta be shitting me…
as most of our team is in Israel, they don’t have access to this content either – we feel your pain and we don’t think geo-locking makes sense either.
As content providers are able to make more money distributing over the Internet, we think the idea of geo-locking becomes less appealing for them and their customers. It’s going to take some time for those negotiations to happen, but we think they will.
We run a centralised linux box in our flat, running karmic with XBMC on top. We also have XBMC on our PCs (running on Windows and OSX) and a couple of old Xboxes. Adore it.
The fact that I can click play on a TV show and have it randomly play one from the series’ entire run makes the idea of going back to disc-based content laughable.
What might be a nice addition would be a Boxee brand NAS, assuming it works in roughly the same way as XBMC?
Ive been using boxee for a while and I had a little issue with most of the stuff available is US only programming and its bloody annoying. I hate geolocation.
I’ve been using Boxee for a while now and love the new beta. Echo the comments about lack of UK content. You can use a vpn service to access US content (eg Witopia PPTP). Works well for most US content on Boxee with the exception of Hulu.
Would be great if there was an easy way to turn the VPN on and off from within Boxee. Seen an app for openvpn but not pptp on a Mac. Anyone seen one?
Yeah, you’ll have to count me out too, unfortunately, because if the lack of PVR support. The whole Internet tv thing is great in the US and UK, and we’re starting to get a bit in Australia (ABC & SBS), but it also assumes you’ve got an enormous quota. Lots of people don’t even have broadband, let alone decent quotas in Australia (outside the capitals)! And does noone watch live tv anymore? AFAICT the only other os PVR setup is Freevo, which was a bit limited for me. Is tv really so hard only myth really supports it? I’m a bit disappointed because I really like Plex on my Mac and if it could be integrated with EyeTV, that’d be fantastic! Oh well, I’ll keep waiting and fighting myth in the meantime.
All these people moaning about a lack of recording lack vision IMO. Boxee could have used loads of resources, time and money towards doing recording and 5 years from now it would be all but obsolete as everything will be available online. Or they could have put that same time and effort into bringing streaming to the masses sooner, becoming the market leaders in the process. I know which one I would choose.
Besides, if you really do want a permanent archive of a show on your harddrive Boxee has torrent support…
http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/01/20/coming-soon-boxee-payments/
No such thing as a free lunch it seems.
I don’t think Boxee will be charging money for stuff that would otherwise be free.
@b1ackcr0w – boxee is still free, and we will still give you access to all of the free content that’s on the web. lunch is still free.
for people who want to pay for dessert, we just want to give them that option : )
the goal of the payments platform is to help content providers put more of their content online, content which otherwise wouldn’t be feasible to make available via an ad-only revenue model.
The Neuros Link was like this before the Boxee box cam out. Also the one downside to Boxee is your friends can see what you watch. So don’t watch pr0n using Boxee!;-)
you could always turn off sharing. With the new Beta there’s only recommendations, so you don’t have to worry about recommending adult content to friends, until they come over and think it’s funny to recommend stuff from your account…
Frankly, I think Boxee needs hell of a lot of improvement. It’s a great concept, but nowhere near smooth enough in day to day use.
The worrying this is, they’re going to charge for the Boxee box. I hope the software is more stable and smoother than the current Beta.
Boxee is cool, but I am in the process of building a home theater pc. I know most people aren’t that savvy to build their own PC but they will do absolutely anything you want them to do, Blu-Ray, DVR, gaming, internet, mp3s. You can even use them to build a wireless home network to access your media in the whole house.
I’ve got a Mac Mini running Boxee and I love it! The best of the PC + Boxee – my only complaint is that I still have to resort to the keyboard and mouse from time to time.
Doesn’t do Blu-Ray, but does everything else, and I’ve got a homemade PC running on a 23″ monitor in my bedroom for gaming : )
So far I haven’t had to resort to the keyboard and mouse at all, which is nice (except when Boxee crashes, mumble mumble). I don’t have any input devices on the upstairs Boxee at all; instead, I use the web UI I built from my Android phone. This works, but it’d be a lot, lot better if QueryMusicDatabase and QueryVideoDatabase worked in the Boxee HTTP API, and me mailing Boxee directly for support through the website has garnered no response at all about that. If there’s anyone you can poke over there about that, Andrew, that’d be cool
Thanks for the replies Andrew.
This is shaping up to be a major piece of Open Source awesome. I have to say that with Boxee shipping at circa $200, if iPads were priced at $200, there would be a marginal debate. Get a Boxee which is gorgeous, original and does something useful and cool? Or get an iPad which is goergeous and er um, that’s it. But they’re not $200. Boxee is $200, iPad is $600. If there is any justice in the world, you shouldn’t be able to get these out the door fast enough to keep up with the demand.
From what I’ve seen (tested it on my laptop), this can be a killer. I never wanted an HTPC, for more than one reason. 1) My girlfriend needs to be able to control it. 2) I don’t want an entertainment system that boots up in over a minute. Although it seems trivial, it will be annoying in the long run having to wait for over 60s before you can actually use it. 3) I do not want to use a keyboard/mouse on my couch. Just a remote control is what I want.
At the moment I’m using a Western Digital HD Live, which streams the HD content from my linux server. Works fine as in: 1) GF can control it, 2) boots up in seconds, 3) remote control.
In that respect, boxee has nothing to offer against my WD box, however, from what I’ve seen user interface wise, there’s a big usability step up. Another big plus is the access to all of this online content, where I now only have access to Youtube with my WD, a whole world of content is freed with the Boxee.
I say yes to Boxee, and cannot wait for the moment the little box enters my home!