A Love Letter To The Boxee Box: The Boxee Box Review

A Love Letter To The Boxee Box: The Boxee Box Review

By Barry Orlov

You just can't imagine it. When some people found that they have bought product, they go all out to share with the world. This is the case of an owner of the Boxee Box. He loved the Boxee Box so much that he even wrote a review on the Boxee Box titled: "A Love Letter To he Boxee Box". 

If you are searching for a media streamer to enhance your digital home entertainment, read on...

This is a customer review of the Boxee Box by D-Link HD Streaming Media Player

Okay, so in one sentence, I love the Boxee Box. Throw all your movie files at it and it eats em up easily, scrapes IMDB for ratings/synopsis/and DVD covers. Apps include good stuff like Rev3 podcasts and TWiT, as well as Pandora, TED talks, Flickr, Wired, MLB, and NBATV to name some of my favs. It also gathers the most popular shows on the internet and allows you to watch selected episodes for free. There is a full function flash browser which is really cool for me since I like to watch Starcraft 2 tournament streams and other flash streaming sites and it easily connects to my shared folders over WiFi.

Pros:
1) Plays all movie files including ISOs, m2ts ps3 blu rays, MKV, etc... Loads them quickly and it looks beautiful. There are options on the Boxee Box to set video all the way up to 1080p 24hz.

2) Apps, I love shows on Rev3 and TWiT, and this makes it a lot easier than downloading them, I find myself watching more things when I am bored, simply because its easy and available.

3) I love love love that it automatically gets DVD covers for all the movies I have, its such a nice touch and looks beautiful. I remember years back these movie stars were talking about their Kaleidoscope movie system that cost $30k and could keep all your movies on it with cover art and u just click a button to watch them, now this is achievable with this $200 box that does even more than that.

4) As I mentioned movies load pretty quickly, and if you stop a movie and leave to the main menu, it keeps your place perfectly so that when you click back to it you are watching right where you left off.

5) Ports, the Boxee Box has em all. SD card slot, 2 USB, HDMI, composite audio, and digital audio. Connect an external HD with any movies on it and it will scan it and add them all to your library with cover art in minutes

6) The Boxee Box’s remote looks simple on one side, but flip it over and it has a full QWERTY keyboard to navigate websites and input usernames and passwords, something no other box has.

7) Friends list, shows anything your friends recommend

8) Watch later, is a great feature that is probably underused, I have a ton of media, and I don't really feel like watching a lot of it, but there are certain things I can't wait to see, so I just add those hot items to the watch later list so I can just click that instead of navigating through 200 movies

9) UI of the Boxee Box looks nice enough and is fairly easy to navigate, again this box does more than any other, so there are a lot of menu features

Cons:
1) Remote, every time I pick it up it's always backwards, kind of a design flaw, as well as not having a backlight, considering people in home theaters are almost always in the dark, it kind of renders the QWERTY useless.

2) Some of the menu options are hidden or not as easy to find for the less technically inclined

3) No Netflix or Hulu (yet), should be coming any week now. I don't personally use any of them so it doesn't piss me off as much as it has others, but it WILL have it so keep an eye out.

4) The design of the Boxee Box is dumb in my opinion, you cannot stack it with other theater components and it's not that cool that it looks like its melting into your table

All in all the Boxee Box is a must buy for theater nerds and normal folks alike. Once it has Netflix then it really isn't a question if you should spend the little extra to get the Boxee Box over a very limited functionality box like Apple TV or Roku.

P.S. – Netflix is available on the Boxee Box as of February 14, 2011 in Canada and the US.

What Other Users Are Saying About The Boxee Box In Their Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars: Worth it …The reason I am giving this 5 starts is two-fold. 1) It does what it says it does. And does it well. The local content streams HD video beautifully and without the hassle of plugging my laptop into my tv just to watch a show or movie. The apps also work well, especially TED, Pandora and Vice. Cannot wait for Netflix though. 2) The reception to user feedback has been incredible. Each and every complaint is getting individual attention; and not just for bugs. For instance, people have complained it takes to many click to get to local content. So now, an update will give users the option of featuring their local content. By  Matthew Kirsch

5.0 out of 5 stars: Gets better every day I've owned it. …The first day I had the Boxee box I was very happy to have a new device to play my movies, tv shows, music, and view my photos. I'm moving to the Boxee from a custom atom powered Ion net top running XBMC. I had to be a giant nerd to use the XBMC on that computer. The Boxee box is braindead simple to setup, use, and maintain. I started by adding my network shares (nerdy part). After leaving Boxee to scan my shares I was very happy to see all my tv episodes were labeled and the movies had their posters. I'm very happy with the Boxee box, the only shortcoming is that I couldn't play a 1080p video over my Gigiabit network. Hopefully future software releases fix this. By  Timothy OBrien

5.0 out of 5 stars: Boxee is Awesome I love the Boxee Box. It's a little tricky to set up at first (They are working on making it easier), but once it's set up it works and plays moives, TV, Music, etc flawlessly. Boxee is a great way to make your television more social. By  Nathaniel

5.0 out of 5 stars: AMAZING Product As a user who download a lot of MKV files in 1080p but also likes to slip in a good bit of NetFlix as well this thing is awesome. I've got a 2TB drive hooked up to it and it's playing everything I toss at it without a problem (mostly 1080/720p mkv files, but also a few AVI files). It also plays Netflix and HBOGO just fine. I couldn't be happier. They recently added Spotify, which has just been the cherry on top of this experience. 5 Star. By  Z. Fretty

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