© Boxee press image image of boxee
© Boxee press image
The Boxee Box is a rather impressive piece of hardware, built by D-Link and running the Boxee open source media software.
The first thing that you notice when you open the box is just how small the player is. Seeing it in photos doesn’t prepare you for its diminutive size. Since there is no internal hard drive, it’s the right size but it’s impressively small. It is a corner cut-off black cube with a pulsing green logo that appears on the side when switched on.
The connectors around the back are fairly basic; a HDMI port, some USB ports, a pair of red and white phono connectors for some speakers, and an optical out for high definition sound. There’s a LAN port too, but no e-SATA.
Since the January 2011 firmware update, things are a lot more stable, but still rather American-focused. Still, other things work brilliantly. It can stream high definition video over a home plug network without any problems, and the same goes for DVD ISO’s. It will pick-up media from network storage or a shared folder upon a PC, but it will also take a USB hard drive too. Connecting a USB hard drive is straightforward, especially since a couple of clicks in the setting menu allow you to access the drive over your network.
It scans directories for media, indexes them, and adds details (like a brief description and a film poster). This is really user friendly. It does show the odd error, but it’s fairly easy to manually amend individual files.
Another thing that is useful is the profiling. I have two profiles set up, one for me with all the violent films that adults love, and one for the children, with child friendly films.
The hardware is great; it’s really quiet and unobtrusive. The firmware is still a work in progress but what it does well at the moment it does very well. It’s not the cheapest streamer around but it is so much more user friendly than the competition.