Be Excellent To Each Other

Mine is connected to my iMac via SMB, which has my Drobo hanging off it on a USB connection with all my media on it. My iMac runs 24/7 and I don't bother to let the boxee drop down to standby, as the power difference is minimal anyway, and I haven't had any lost SMB connections that some people are reporting.

It's currently setup to poll daily, which is working fine, i'll switch it to hourly though once the option is available in the next firmware drop.

Remote wise, i'm sticking with the boxee one for now, let me know how the USB dongle works out as I might get one to use with my Harmony, but the boxee remote is just so light and cute

Just to be clear, if it's polling daily, that means a Walking Dead download via sabnzd+ that completes at 5am on Monday morning might not be available to watch via the Boxee UI until Tuesday? And there's no override for that? :|

Otherwise it sounds good. I suppose I should install Boxee on a MacBook and try it out though, before Amazon actually charge my card.

How does this thing actually work? Where is it getting the content from?

It surely can't be "legally acquiring it" in the way those news bin setups do?

It's just a header box to wherever you already keep your media, surely?

Yup, but you can force a scan at any point if you want to get it into the index earlier, or you can navigate the file system directly if you just want to play the file without it being in the snazzy index, all the scan does is get the file into the library, you can still access any network location and play anything if you want to

As mentioned, the new firmware which should be out soon, will allow an hourly scan option, which is a bit more like it!

The boxee software will show you more than what the boxee box can do, but it will give you a good idea. At the very least, you can run the software and do a scan on your local files, to see what boxee will be able to add to its index correctly. Although if you are running sab and sickbeard and letting that rename files, you shouldn't have too many problems.

Oh right. Sounds like my xbox exactly does the same job then. Without needing to be left on 24 hours a day (admittedly, my original xbox on for a few hours probably uses more than this thing does in a day, but still)

The Boxee offers much greater support for different file formats. For example, your 360 won't stream an MKV file from a Windows file share, which is my typical use case.

You don't have to do that, that's just how Trooper is using it.

I think the Boxee uses something like 20 watts an hour?

It may do exactly the same job, or it may not, depending on what you use it for

I use the boxee to stream full HD content that I have on local media, and also to watch content from the internet.
For example, last night I watched the latest Glee in 720p quality, which I have on my hard disk via SickBeard. A 1080p version of Despicable Me which I legally obtained <cough> and I also streamed an episode of The Inbetweeners that the Boxee Box had found on the internet and indexed for me in my show list, I think it was streaming from the Channel 4 ad supported youtube channel, but I have no idea, I just chose it from the list and pressed play.
I could have watched any episode of the IT Crowd, or Misfits, or CSI:Miami, or etc... There are about 1000 shows in the list to choose from.
I also fired up iPlayer and ITV Player, just because I could

Sure, there are lots of other options for doing this stuff, but the Boxee Box just makes it so easy.

2 sources.

Either local media you have, or aggregated content that it finds on the internet. Typically from YouTube, 4OD, ABC, etc...
If you install the unoffical Navi-X app, then that is an aggregated list of pirated films that you can stream if you wanted to. Personally I don't want to watch a telecam version of Harry Potter with MP3 sound, but the option is there if you want it....

10-15W apparently. That's really not much at all.

Blimey, that is less than I thought!

Certainly a fair amount less than the Windows based HTPC it has replaced, which had a 300w power supply

That is good!

OK, it does do a bit more than the xbox then, but not £200 worth more, not for me anyway.

That reminds me. Must get that Atom board I was craving

Where does the money come from!

Crime

On the stairs, next to crying students.

For a bit more money I would get one of these

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-Nettop-I ... 115&sr=8-1

Then stick the Linux based XBMC, plenty of Live CD's that do everything for you set up wise here

http://www.xbmcfreak.nl/en/

I think you will be able to run the Boxee with XBMC before long there are posts etc about it on the site, I only really go there for the updated Live CD's though.

Why spend more money to get something that does exactly the same?

It does a lot more XMBC is much better the Boxee

I found xbmc to be pretty crap to be honest, for reasons already mentioned in the thread

New firmware is out

You can now make the ui more local content focussed, which is great. You also have the mark watched/unwatched flag back for movies, which is also great.

In doing that they have fucked up the watched flag for tv shows, so they always show up as unwatched.

Bloody idiots

My Boxee will be here today!

Woohoo!

It's buggy as fuck, but I love mine

Well having read this thread I now want one of these. It would certainly save me hours converting mkv's to playback on my 360 before having them stall halfway though playback.

Does anyone know if you can hook up an external Blu-Ray drive?

You can't.

Ordered 6th Dec
Dispatched 16th Dec
No sign of it yet

Fucking Amazon/Royal Mail/snow/Christmas/karma.

Boo, sucks!

I haven't found anything that it won't play yet, still love the thing a couple of weeks on

I might put Boxee on my MacBook and dock it to the TV over Christmas as an interim solution.

Reading around, I am now concerned Boxee won't parse my existing media library, which is almost entirely formatted like this:
Am I right?

Hmm, not too sure.

mine is


Which works fine, but you are missing the show name from the file name itself, which might cause issues?
I just let SickBeard handle all the renaming for me, which works fine with Boxee scraping.

Best bet is to fire up the boxee software on your mac and test the scraping, if it finds them fine now, then no reason why the boxee box will have any problems

Yes, this is what my reading has suggested. Which is pretty shit, frankly.

So do I but I changed the default. Prepending the filename with the series name makes it harder to read when using things like the PS3 or the WD TV Live, as they don't show enough characters for you to read the episode name without scrolling.

This is another part of why I was pondering docking the Mac to my TV. With Amazon being a week late I can easily reject the shipment and claim a refund if I don't like it, or return it under the Distance Selling Act if it does turn up.

Hang on, you've got a mac, and you've got an xbox already plugged into the TV, right?

Shouldn't that just work, for playing tv episodes? It does for me. (You may have already told me why it doesn't for you but I can't be bothered reading back). Sorry.

It only works for small values of work. For reasons I have discussed at length at can't be arsed to restate

360 no playee MKV.

Hey, if you scroll up, we had this conversation at the top of this very page.

I spoke too soon; my sources at home are telling me it just turned up!

Oops!
It's just that I've not found anything it won't play that I've downloaded with sickbeard or whatever, hence continuing to believe in it

Well, now, this appears to be really quite nifty.

Did it find all your files ok in the end?

Um. Shit. So. Right.

I have my D-Link NAS. Which is massively underpowered, so I have my old laptop running TVersity, for real-time transcoded streaming to the PS3 and 360. The laptop also runs iTunes, so my 1st gen iPod Touch can Remote it and stream to AirPorts. It works, in a slightly electricity-spendy fashion*.

So why do I now want a Boxee Box in the living room for streaming from the NAS and a 64GB Touch for AirPlay to the AEs? I'll still need the NAS and PS3 anyway, and in addition to having spent £520 I'll also not be able to stream to the bedroom. Yet this makes sense somehow?

Can Harmony remotes control the Boxee Box? Hopefully the answer is "no" and I can forget about this.

* Though the laptop has a 65W PSU which can drive the screen at full brightness, charge the battery, peg the CPU and thrash the HDD all at once, so without the first two, mostly-idle CPU and HDD and disabled WLAN it should be a small fraction of that.

Not out of the box; the Boxee Box has a RF remote and no IR receiver. However, any Microsoft Media Centre remote control USB receiver dongle can be used to get around that problem, and they are about a tenner on eBay (I think; I reused a spare one I had lying around).

Also, I think the answer to my question is "because you bastards are talking about them again, in the iPad thread."

How many of the Boxee content channels actually work in the UK?

Loads. In fact, as it supports iPlayer, ITVplayer, and 4od, but doesn't do Hulu or Netflix, you could argue the picture is rosier in the UK than the US.

Nothing's going to get me US content on US release dates though, right?

You could move to America? Of continue with Sickbeard, which is The Best Thing Ever.

Aye, I downloaded Michel Roux's Service last night, to see if it was any good. Boxee picked it up and put it in my local show list, but when I went into the show directory it had all the episodes there ready to play, my local one and it had added the shows I could get from the BBC streaming service into the list.
It's really quite clever.

If you want paid subscription services in the UK though, forget it for now.

Nothing legal short of a VPN to the States and Hulu account, no. It's a notable drawback to the platform that Craig is quite right to highlight in the iPad thread. I suspect that over time content providers will start to support this and similar platforms, but of course that alone is not a good reason to buy one now.

Sickbeard and usenet is one option.

VPN and Hulu via Boxee Box is another, but hold fire as Hulu isn't working as yet.

I have no doubt that the companies will *eventually* see the global market as viable. As it stands though, Sky are highly unlikely to allow another service to show say HBO stuff, whilst their contracts are still in place.

I honestly think people are willing to pay for this stuff. Shit, I pay £16 ish a month for my usenet sub now and it's worth every penny.

That's what I thought. So the only benefit would be the ability to watch HD stuff that I've yoinked, which the 360 can't currently do. Hmm.

I'd be more tempted if it wasn't RRP $199 and RRP £199.