Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, yes. But the whole experience of doing that is so much nicer than on the 360.
Is that better experience worth the £200 entry fee? It was for me, I can't say for others though

So if I have a boxee box and an iWhateverthefuck is there suddenly loads of stuff on that's actually worth watching?

@Cras- less than £100 on a WD TV Live would also achieve that. The Boxee's main additional upgrade is future support via plugins, a far nicer UI, and other stuff that's arguably frippery. Try Boxee out on a computer first would be my advice.

No.

There's only one thing in my sickbeard "coming soon" list at the moment, which is when House restarts next week.

House restarted *this* week, dude.

Gosh, in my Sickbeard coming soon:

Friday Night Lights
Hustle
Californication
Being Human
Top Gear
Castle
Chuck
House
Modern Family
Come Fly With Me
Smallville
The Big Bang Theory
Glee
No Ordinary Family
The Event

Oh, so it did
*actually starts SAB*

Don't want to see any of that really apart from Chuck. Of the UK stuff there's only Top Gear and Being Human and they'll be on Freeview in HD.

Fair enough, I recommend you don't get a Boxee Box then

I have 2 UK shows in my queue. Top Gear and Doctor Who.

Mainly because I decided against getting a Freeview HD decoder and would like to see them both in HD.

Hello Boxee fans.
Do any of you run your Boxee over wifi?

Nope, fully wired here!

New firmware released today, Boxee fans!

And the new firmware is really nice, nfo support etc...

Apart from it screws up the sound and 2 channel PCM stereo is sent out at 5.1DD

2 steps forward, 3 steps back...

Does the Boxee do iPlayer? Does it do live iPlayer?

This is fucking shit.

It does have an app for iplayer... but it hasn;t worked for 2 months! They are fixing it... honest.
iplayer works from the boxee browser though, and they have a dedicated BBC channel on the shows list in boxee now, so you can get to the iplayer content that way.

Doesn't do live as far as I am aware?

Not sure what to do, the new firmware is great apart from that, and totally sorts out my missing local content issues, but the audio problem is a killer.
One comment from a boxee employee has stated that it isn't a bug and was a choice they made due to licensing! Which has to be bollocks, doesn't it?

All signs point towards them scrimping on licensing costs and doing a crazy deal with Dolby. Not a good sign of this being fixed anytime soon!

Thinking it's going back to Amazon for a refund under the Sales of Goods Act.

Im going to see what happens next week, i'm hoping they are trying to sort it out and just being tight-lipped at the moment.

The only real communication going on is in the avs forum thread.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthre ... 2&page=239

Maybe some publicity on a few techy websites would push their hand a little.

I pitched a guest post to Engadget but they turned their nose up at it. I'm working on it though.

You will always have bugs and problems with devices like this if you buy into them early.

It was the same with the Popcorn Hour and to some extent the XBMC.

With the XMBC, I waited until some hardware emerged that ticked all the boxes (ION 330)

Even then it’s not been without some learning around Linux, but I enjoyed this.

"Bugs and problems" doesn't really cover "deliberate removal of important features in mandatory firmware updates" to me.

Followed by carte blanche refusal to even acknowledge the multitude of users who are complaining and asking why it was done

Apparently it has been "fixed" so we shall see what the next release brings, whenever that is.

This sort of stuff happens all the time sadly.

Take Thecus for example who sell for the “enterprise” and with whom I spent the best part of 2K on a NAS and drives a couple of years ago.

Thecus have a list of approved hard drives. When I bought my NAS I purchased some 2TB drives that where on the list.

3 months later the drives have been removed from the list as they are problematic in RAID arrays. I sent my NAS back to Thecus and they replaced the motherboard with the next model up to resolve the issue, still I have the issue where at least once every 3 months one of the drives is kicked out of the array. It’s taken some learning but I can fix it via SHH, it just takes 7 hours each time to rebuild the array.

Recently I screwed up and removed another disk from the array so good bye data. Even though this was fixable I was unable to do it. The SSH modules that Thecus allows but doesn’t support are dependent on having a RAID array. Thecus fixed it for me but on their terms with tools they wouldn’t share.

Thecus also pull firmware from their site with no notice if it suits them to do so and will not entertain requests for any removed firmware’s.

Hopefully your issues are getting fixed now??

So the audio issues got fixed

Just posting to say how amazing my little boxee box is still!
Read a thread on another forum about the new episode of James may's toy stories that I missed. Picked up the boxee remote, turned it over and typed in James may, it brought up the episode, I clicked play and I'm now watching it in HD, simple as that

Forgot to mention, my whiny open letter prompted their VP of marketing to send me a free t-shirt

Sell me on this, chums. I'm not entirely happy with using the 360 as my media header unit:

1) Navigation interface is a bit rubbish
2) Codec support is poor

So I'm idly eying up other units I can use, and the boxee looks like the front-runner. If it had a BD drive, I'd have bought it already, but as it stands I'm still quite keen.

I'd be mostly streaming stuff from my server, but what's the built-in content like for us Europeans?

get a 360No, bad phone, not 3 year old.

Get a ps3

I dont know if the box itself is different but can you not simply download the 'pc' version (they have unix / mac / windows) and try it out first ?

(I have boxie on my pc - and some of the odd things it can pull from random sites is quite impressive but in general its just a common place for BBC / Ch4 / etc)

I'm not overjoyed with it -- it has weird glitches like how sometimes I get no sound until I reset it, for example, and they keep fucking with the software and removing (admittedly small) things in mandatory updates. But I have to admit it's by far the most advanced and most powerful media streamer I've ever seen or heard of. I'd buy another if mine broke.

Not bad, you get iPlayer, 4OD, and whatever the ITV thing is. But you have Giganews Unlimited, right? In which case you just put the VPN on the Boxee and you get Netflix, Vudu, etc etc. You do need to faff a little bit to pay for them but there's plenty of guides out there on how to do that.

The PS3 is a great media streamer , but it does rely on there being something behind it (so a machine serving the content) whereas Boxie or similar will scrape various video websites for content

It's worse than that. The PS3 relies on having something behind it with the grunt to transcode it to a format the PS3 can play back. I know Craster doesn't, because he has the same server I have and I upgraded the CPU in mine and it'd still struggle to do 1080p (plus transcoding messes up ffwd/rwd).

The Boxee can play every format you can imagine natively, without requiring anything on the other end than an SMB share.

Absolutely - and relieving the server of the need to transcode is one reason I want to replace the 360.

Is this thing able to access everything on iPlayer? My parents need a new TV getting thing, and I was thinking this might be the answer. Are there other options too?

The Boxee Box is easily the front runner for a dedicated streamer, the UI is better than anything else out there, and codec support is excellent. It has its bugs like everything, and Boxee are awful at quality control (latest debacle being around SMB support and forced firmware upgrades breaking SMB support for a lot of users, luckily it didn't affect me even though I use SMB, but rolling back to earlier firmwares if you are unlucky is bit of a bitch to do) seemingly preferring to develop new functionality and iPad apps, rather than fixing bugs…

If what you want to do is stream local content across the network, it really is great once you get it up setup and working.

Not a huge amount of paid content for EU people, but pretty much all the free services are on there in some form or other. I don't really use them though. An occasional show via iPlayer is my limit, which works fine.

Basically, it's awesome and buggy shit in equal measure, but it's the best you'll get at the moment

I'm not sure I've come across a file it won't play. Is there a list?

[edit]Here is a list: http://manuals.playstation.net/document ... types.html

iPlayer is available on internet-connected FreeSat boxes (channel 901), and works. The HQ stream is nowhere near as high quality as on PS3, which is nowhere near as good as FreeSat HD, but it's very watchable (and my eyes are stupid). itvPlayer is hitting it soon (it's supposed to be there now, but didn't work when I tried it).

Quite a few TV's now come with some stuff like that built in (mines has a lan port on the back and can stream - but again you need the content) otheres come with stuff like that already in place - and you obviously have the consoles (even the Wii can do iplayer)

For dedicated devices I've also played around in the past with a Western Digital TV unit which streamed okay but didnt have much support for any online stuff - you could also look at the Apple TV which although it has its limits does stream stuff quite well 'out of the box' and can be jailbroken to do more

WTFF? It won't play AVIs (with anything other than Motion-JPEG in, which is only used by low-end cameras in "video" mode) and H.264/MKVs, for starters. That's all my content at a stroke, and I'd imagine all of yours.

My Windows 7 based Media Center streams anything, due to it using whatever codec you supply. If you could cope with an actual PC attached to your TV, there are a number of nettops that can comfortably handle hi-bitrate 1080p streams with their onboard graphics.

This is the only alternative to a Boxee I'd consider, I think; something self-built. All the other integrated sealed-box streamers have too many drawbacks.

Did media center. I've moved on. It wasn't bitter.

Oh -- the Boxee's remote is awesomesauce.

My PS3 > Your PS3, clearly.

I will investigate all of my stuff when I get home, but I've not found anything it won't play yet.

Except for a video of my driving my radio controlled car, IIRC.

[edit]My NAS box is running TwonkyVision, which may be doing some magic (but certainly nothing that complicated). I will find out what tonight.

But worth pointing out that it has no IR pickup so the Harmony doesn't work out of the box. You can use the IR dongle from any Windows Media Center remote, however, which I think you may have a spare of, Cras.

I wasn't being serious. I don't use either console, as neither seems to play overly well.

For what little streaming I do do, I just use boxee software on a desktop

This will be the reason (I used to run Twonky on a NSLU2 and it streamed just about anything to the PS3)

I had a self built HTPC that I replaced with the Boxee, I don't regret it