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Review: Boxee Box

Feb 22, 2011  By Shawn Powers
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Shawn reviews the Boxee Box from D-Link. Oddly enough, it's not really box shaped. Thankfully it still works well, for the most part.

See Shawn's full, detailed review of the Boxee Box in the April 2011 issue of Linux Journal.

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very happy Boxee Box user

Tuxly_Tuxford_McTuxtington's picture
Submitted by Tuxly_Tuxford_M... on Thu, 04/28/2011 - 19:44.

I bought my Boxee Box a few months ago, since I wanted a really easy way to watch online-only content (Revision3 and This Week in Tech video). I was surprised at everything else that the box lets me do. First of all, the obvious: it is a fully featured media center PC (which easily handles all formats I've thrown at it, decodes surround sound from both DTS and Dolby, and streams 1080p video over my wifi network).

Aside from streaming my own content, though, it provides a one-stop-shop for all of the streamed content available on the major network websites (I'm in Canada, so I get to watch shows from CTV, City, Global, Discovery, HGTV, etc). This is really cool. It's all stuff that is available from the websites, but I never went to them to watch stuff online, since it's scattered everywhere. The Boxee Box puts it all into one spot with a common user interface.

It also offers Netflix Canada, which is very inexpensive and gives me a ton of other content to watch. For an initial $200 and $8 a month, I get a media center and all of the streaming I can handle. It's cheaper than cable! :)

Boxee Box Cost

crh's picture
Submitted by crh (not verified) on Mon, 02/28/2011 - 10:57.

Why should I consider buying the Boxee Box over one of the Roku models?

I bought a lightly use Roku HD off of Craig's List for forty dollars and with the SDK, should be able to stream my own content, if I had any. I prefer the Amazon pay as you go approach to renting movies event though Netflix is also available, as it is with Boxee Box.

  • Roku: $60-$100
  • Boxee:$199

    • Boxee on Jolicloud

    German Dominguez's picture
    Submitted by German Dominguez (not verified) on Sun, 02/27/2011 - 17:04.

    So, I installed Boxee on my Jolicloud installation on a Dell Mini 1010, and tried consuming content from my PlayStation Media Server on Ubuntu (http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/), although the Media Server recognized the Boxee client as an XBox media client, but all the movie content was shown with color problem, inverse colors you may say and the audio was not in synch with the actual video. I tend to blame Boxee for that, since it goes really slow on my Jolicloud. But...what you know...

    Anyway, just wanted to share this experience.

    I was very unhappy with the

    Tuxly_Tuxford_McTuxtington's picture
    Submitted by Tuxly_Tuxford_M... on Thu, 04/28/2011 - 19:49.

    I was very unhappy with the Linux version of the Boxee software, but love the Box's interface. Boxee is focusing on developing the Box software instead of the downloadable version.

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