Boxee Box Review
The Boxee Box by D-Link is a great device. Perhaps not entirely intuitive for someone who has difficulty using their DVR, but it’s definitely ‘learn’ to anyone.
I have two USB external drives are connected (both powered) with literally terabytes of audio and video, and be able to index all the data is quite good (considering). Like everyone else, I’m waiting for Netflix app, but apart from that device to accomplish all that I expected. Local media playback is the best.
Follow the file naming convention (tv.show.name.e01s01.avi and / or film.name.avi) was a slight annoyance, but with a freeware mass-file “renamer” I was able to eliminate the spaces in my filenames and replace them with a.
Needs work: I’ve noticed that if you pause playback of a local file for more than 10 minutes, it will often resume playing JUST the audio. The only ‘fix’ I’ve found for this is to power the Boxee Box off and back on again. I’m sure it’s a bug that will be addressed.
WiFi solid, but because he was sitting right next to my router, I use Ethernet (one less device to compete for the signal). Streaming from a PC / Mac works perfectly, the setup is relatively straight forward for anyone even vaguely familiar with file sharing. The Boxee Box SD Card slot is only icing on the cake. I do not even think I would use it, and I had two times.
Auto-local file you identify the media as a whole is pretty solid. Sometimes it does flake out a bit, and even when manually trying to correct it, a “data cannot be pulled up right now” message appears. When using the correct file naming structure, Boxee was able to identify 920′ish of my 1003 video files. The process also takes a while to complete – but with 2.1TB of data (so far) it’s actually not bad (about 7 hours total – and takes FAR less after the initial scan).
I’d recommend D-link Boxee Box to anyone that has a lot of digital media that they’d like to play through their TV and/or stereo, and wants to be able to do other fun things (update Twitter, view YouTube videos, Netflix (soon), etc).
No related posts.
