By At $199.99 (list), the Boxee Box by D-Link is priced halfway between the Apple TV ($99, 4 stars) and the Logitech Revue ($299, 4 stars). Along with the Roku XDS ($99, 2.5 stars) and the Sony Internet TV Blu-ray Disc Player ($399, 4 stars), these are the Boxee Box’s chief media hub competitors, each offering a unique take on the Wi-Fi-connected set-top box. The box is based on the free Internet-based Boxee service, which rounds up videos from the Web and puts them in an easy-to-search user interface on your HDTV. But it’s hobbled at launch by a lack of video service apps, like Netflix, Vudu, and Hulu Plus, that the company claims are on the way. It’s saved, however, by a quality user interface and robust file support—ideal for those who, um, “find” free movies on the Web.
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Design and Remote Control
It took a full year for the Boxee Box by D-Link to morph from an exciting concept to in-store product, and in that time, we’ve become familiar with its unique design. Unlikely to blend with your home theater components like the Apple TV or the Logitech Revue, the Boxee Box is shaped like, well, a square box, sitting on an angle, with some corners cut away to create the appearance that the cube is embedded in whatever surface it sits upon. Measuring 4.6 by 4.5 by 4.5 inches (HWD), it’s glossy black plastic, with a neon lime green rubber underside. The back panel houses a modest but useful set of connections—HDMI, Ethernet, two USB ports, Optical (S/PDIF) out, and analog stereo RCA outputs—a notable inclusion for those with analog stereo receivers (and one that is woefully absent on the Apple TV and Google TV products). There is also an SD/SDHC memory card slot on the right-hand panel for cards up to 32GB. When the unit is powered up, the Boxee Box by D-Link logo lights and appears behind the surface of the front-facing panel. The unit ships with a power adapter and an HDMI cable—another thoughtful inclusion lacking in most of the competition’s packages.
Also included is the essential—and at first, seemingly excellent—remote control. How clever of Boxee to use both sides of the remote—why isn’t that the norm? One side is a QWERTY keyboard with numbers, symbols, and arrow navigation, while the other has a Play/Pause button, four directional navigation buttons with Enter in the middle, and a Settings/Menu button that doubles as the Power control when held down long enough. The keyboard’s rubber keys feel great, and typing on it is, initially, a breeze…until you realize the remote’s fatal flaw. The playback and navigation buttons on the flip side of the remote are situated almost exactly where you rest your fingers when typing with your thumbs. Inevitably, you occasionally press one of the buttons when you’re trying to type on the QWERTY pad—this occurred several times during testing. We witnessed Boxee reps, who’ve logged far more hours with the box, have the same problem. Eventually, you learn to hold the remote with the tips of your fingers along the edges, but it’s awkward.
Specifications
Setting Up
Getting the Boxee Box up and running isn’t complicated, but it’s tedious because you must update the firmware, which involves multiple downloads, installations, and reboots until there are no more updates. That said, it’s nearly impossible to screw up. Once you’ve established an Internet connection with the box via either Wi-Fi (the box supports 802.11 b, g, and n) or Ethernet cable, you’re ready to install all those updates. You’ll also need an Internet-connected computer handy when setting up the box—there’s some basic account info that you’ll need to enter at Boxee’s Web site, but it’s a one-time thing. If you have no Boxee account, you’ll be prompted to create one—they’re free. Then you can start populating your account with media, none of which can be stored on the box itself—there’s no integrated storage. Boxee stores shows and movies you mark as favorites, and pushes new ones to your account, but this is all done in “the cloud”. There is a social aspect to Boxee, too—it’s easy to follow friends and see which videos they choose to share.
Performance and Apps
It’s hard to grasp how a product that has been hyped for a year and is manufactured by an established partner could be missing so many services at launch. It’s not that the Boxee Box won’t have Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Vudu, it’s that somehow, these apps aren’t on the box yet. Hulu Plus is understandable: Roku just added it to its line of players, and Sony just put the service on its PlayStation 3 and Dash Internet Viewer. But Netflix? Every media hub in existence offers it. Boxee reps claim Netflix is coming by the end of the year, but they gave no delivery dates for Hulu Plus or Vudu. If the box had launched with these apps, it would defintely get a higher rating. Still, even with three major partners missing in action, the set-top box is still surprisingly useful.
The way the Boxee Box works is reminiscent of Google TV—everything you want to find is available via search on your HDTV. The main screen offers different menus to explore: Friends (will show you videos your Boxee friends have shared), Watch Later (videos can be shared, tabbed as Favorites or marked to watch later), Shows, Movies, Files, and Apps (the selection is similar to Roku’s, but is curated by Boxee). The user interface rounds up video from the Web and provides searches and scrollable menus of content that treat every video as if it’s on the box itself, ready to play, and sensibly organized. As long as you’re okay with Internet video-level resolution on your HDTV, the service—which is, again, free—is quite useful and efficient.
Pressing the Settings/Menu button on the remote brings up the Search tab. You can enter either a search term or a URL in the field—entering a Web address immediately opens the browser and loads the desired Web site. The browser, a Boxee invention designed using Web kit, is pretty weak. There is flash support, however—that’s essential to the Boxee Box’s operation, since much of the content it pulls for you is Flash-based. Since Roku boxes and Apple TV lack browsers, this inclusion can be viewed as icing on the cake, even if it’s a bit bland. If you enter a search term instead, say, The Daily Show, the box immediately loads a page full of available Daily Show content. Various icons tell you whether the videos in the list come from a Web site, an app, or your own USB drive or PC, and everything appears in a tidy list.
One click on a title commences playback. Depending on the video source, the playback screen varies in appearance. Selecting a Daily Show episode might bring you to Comedy Central’s Web site, for instance, to a page hosting the specific episode you want to watch. Selecting the full-screen option fills your television screen. If you select something from YouTube, however, you avoid the browser and the content immediately shows up—any trace of a Web site surrounding the video is gone. You can also define a search’s filters: All (the default), Favorites (searches only content you’ve marked as a favorite), Genres, Channels, and Files (searches only connected drives).
The Boxee Box can read files and play them from connected USB-based drives. So, if you have a vast library of illegally downloaded content (not that you do), the Boxee Box, unlike Apple TV or Google TV devices, can almost definitely play your files, thanks to its robust file support. For video, the box plays back up to 1080p resolution and can handle Adobe Flash 10.1, FLV/On2 VP6, H.264, VC-1, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX 3/4/5/6, Xvid, and WMV9 files. Audio support includes MP3, WAV, PCM/LPCM, WMA, AIFF, AC3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, DTS, and Dolby Digital/Dolby True HD. And for photos, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF are supported.
By checking a box on the user interface, the Boxee Box even adds files from a connected USB drive to the searches you perform in the search window. This is not unlike how Google TV devices can add DISH Network DVR content to its searches. The Google search works better and includes a wider breadth of content, like live TV, but both search options offer instant results as you type.
The Boxee Box can also stream from your PC—you need only to set up a shared folder and then make sure both the Box and the computer are connected on the same network. Your content will show up under the Files menu.
Pandora has done a great job of making its app perform well on just about any platform, and the Boxee Box is no exception. You also get apps like YouTube Leanback (an easy-to-search, personalized approach to YouTube’s content library), Revision3, TWiT, Flickr, and a plethora of others.
You might ask: How does a box like Roku’s XDS get a lower rating when it has essentially has everything the Boxee Box does, plus Netflix at a lower price? Simply put, Roku’s interface is not nearly as user-friendly, it crashes quite often, and although the apps it offers are similar, that is basically all that Roku offers. The XDS even requires an app (a channel) to play content off of a connected USB drive—and it doesn’t come preloaded on the device. In other words, the extra $100 you spend on the Boxee Box buys you a far more rewarding user experience. There’s no crashing, and no need to download apps in order to play USB content—and it’ll even integrate your media into your searches, along with Web content, something Roku can’t do.
Apple TV, although firmly entrenched in the iTunes world, offers far more media, including Netflix, than the Boxee Box currently does (you just have to pay for most of it). Google TV, which is built to work with DVRs, appeals to viewers with less of a need for television shows from the Web, so it’s less relevant to compare here, except to say: If you have no cable or DVR, Boxee will make it feel like you do. Much of the content you can record with a DVR is available, somehow, online, and Boxee finds almost all of it. Combined with the ability to stream your own library of audio and video media, and you have quite a bit of content at your fingertips. Until Netflix, Vudu, and Hulu Plus come along though, the Boxee Box, though cleverly designed and simple to use, is missing a true edge in the new crop of Wi-Fi-connected set-top boxes.
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