Building an Ion-powered Linux Media PC

Boxee

Sometimes it's so smooth I almost don't believe it's still in the Alpha stages of development . That said, occasionally Boxee will still lock up or stutter unexpectedly, or more randomly, completely lose application channels. For those unaware of what Alpha means - it's a term developers use for early code that sometimes still needs a lot of work, could change completely or sometimes features are there as placeholders only for later development.

Boxee has gone through some fundamental interface changes in the last year but with the beta launching in New York literally next week (December 09) this major upgrade in status means the developers behind it are happy with how it looks and feels and will concentrate on ironing out bugs and improving performance. With the recent news that some upcoming dedicated consumer electronics devices will feature a Boxee interface, we can probably be assured that the investment will mean the bugs are eradicated pretty quickly too.


I will be no less than honest and highlight that our impressions of last years software were less than positive. I didn't like the interface and the social media aspect held no appeal to me. Thankfully, the new design is mostly all good this time around. The interface is sleek but it still benefits the use of a mouse, rather than a remote control, unless it's a many-button remote.

Regardless, Boxee feels like it's re-focused on its core idea: playing online and local video, music and pictures, while cutting out a lot of the fluff that made it confusing. I'd still like to see more customisation in the UI based on your own usage patterns: instead of the "what other people are playing" box, creating links to the content and channels you watch or listen to regularly would be a better use of this space. Right now, the home page feels like wasted space if you're not interesting in diving into the full social Boxee experience.


We tried using Boxee's iPod touch/iPhone remote app, that means we can control Boxee over WiFi: no extra hardware or ugly IR peripherals necessary. It worked well enough, but the downside is that the app is extremely basic. You can't use the touchscreen as a mouse, for instance, and the app lacks controls needed for navigation outside the piece of content you're watching. Essentially, while the novelty wears off within minutes. Good job it was free. Back to my mouse.


Getting to media on your hard disk is easy; over a network it involves several more clicks but we found Boxee was quite happy to stream over our LAN (I'd connected via Ethernet). The biggest win for Boxee, over, say VLC, are the links to content channels. These channels show up as shortcuts in the Boxee interface, and it means you can easily browse through internet video and watch it on your TV. The basic list Boxee comes with is already good, but explore the additional packages option in the left hand menu and it becomes exceptional, with channels such as baseball from the MLB and anime from Crunchyroll. You'll be adding things in simply out of curiosity, although, I strongly recommend Boxee invest in some parental locks to remove the numerous adult streams. It successfully conglomerates and opens up a whole internet worth of media, and even leaves it open to add other streaming packages in the future. This is the key differentiation between a Boxee Media PC and a hard disk enclosure with HDMI output such as the awesome Western Digital TV.

Video Playback

The Nvidia drivers work flawlessly in Boxee, as the software picks up the hardware acceleration on the GPU automatically allowing all the video formats we could find to throw at it to work perfectly, including 720p and 1080p. The additional options for upscaling quality are buried in the actual video sub-menu, rather than main settings, whereas the audio settings are in the opposite way around. Although, not much needs tweaking and it's obviously governed by personal preference.


Blu-ray support? Well, there isn't any, but that's unsurprising given that an open platform is incompatible with one of the most DRM-ridden media mediums to date. However, it's not just that - there's no real optical disc support in Boxee, so even DVDs don't get a look in. Despite plugging in a BD-drive and having it registered within the OS, searching through all the local content options doesn't offer it. Boxee appears exclusively geared to digital file playback and streaming.


While many Boxee fans are US-based and benefit from the inclusion of the terrific Hulu, elsewhere we don't get that - but we do get BBC iPlayer in Boxee. The iPlayer interface works, but it's nowhere near as adept as the Beeb's own website version, or even the PS3 version. Unfortunately, despite all the fun we were having nosing around, the software reminded us it was yet again in Alpha by then "losing" the BBC channel. They just disappeared from the list, I simply can't find him. Oh well, can't be helped at this stage.