D-Link Boxee Box January 2011

The first thing to clarify is that Boxee is the software not the hardware. Boxee software has been around for a while for PCs and boasts a simple user interface and support for a vast range of media file types (via codecs). The Boxee Box is simply a basic PC, made by D-Link, and running Boxee software.

Boxee Box hardware

The Boxee Box is a uniquely designed glossy black box with a cut-off angled design that makes it stand out. This does, however, mean that it takes up more room on your TV stand than it needs to, particularly in terms of its height, and you won’t be able to stack any other audiovisual equipment on top of it. When the Boxee Box is switched on, the plain black front panel is illuminated with a glowing Boxee logo. Apart from this, there are no operating buttons or displays on the Boxee Box, short of the power button on one side. All functions are controlled via the remote and on-screen menus.

The Boxee Box remote is double-sided and has a full Qwerty keyboard

The Boxee Box comes with a sleek dual-sided remote control. On the top are a play/pause button, 4-way selector and a back/menu button. On the reverse of the remote is a full Qwerty keyboard. There’s no trackpad, so moving the cursor around while in the web browser isn’t as easy as we’d like it to be. 

We found the keyboard is fine to use for typing words into on-screen search boxes, or entering passwords, but took some getting used to, due to the cluttered layout of small keys. Still, it beats navigating an on-screen keyboard with a standard TV remote control.

Inside the Boxee Box are essentially the internals of a netbook - there’s an Intel Atom CE4100 chip, 1GB of flash storage and 1GB of Ram. On board there’s both wired (ethernet) and wi-fi (draft ‘n’) connections to your home broadband connection, together with HDMI and optical and RCA audio outputs. There are two USB sockets for attaching external USB or hard drives. Finally there’s an SD card slot on the side. HDMI cables are supplied in the box.

Online video

Boxee's homescreen is well laid-out and intuitive to navigate

When it comes to setting up the Boxee, it’s dead easy, although there’s only a very brief quick-start guide supplied, so for more detailed help, you’ll need to head online to the Boxee support forums. 

Hook up the Boxee Box to the internet and your TV and you’re ready to watch the web on your TV. You’ll need to create a free Boxee account, and also log into to any web apps you want to use. This just means entering login details and passwords for services like Facebook and Twitter, and movie streaming services such as LoveFilm.

One of the strongest selling points of the Boxee Box is its compatibility with pretty much any video file type you’re likely to encounter when downloading from the web. 

The Boxee Box can stream media from Macs, PCs and networked hard drives (NAS) attached to your home network. Playback of Full HD 1080p content worked fine, and we also watched some XviD TV programmes stored on USB sticks and these played back well, with no glitches.

Web apps

When it comes to apps, the Boxee Box gives access to plenty of sources, including BBC iPlayer, 4oD, Demand 5, Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr and even adult content. There are also free ad-supported movies from services including IndieMoviesOnline, although popular online movie rental services such as LoveFilm are notable omissions from the Boxee platform in the UK. 

It’s worth noting that while the output of the Boxee Box is 1080p, we found the picture quality of many of the free movies on offer was well below HD picture quality.

What Boxee Box does best is to compile all the various strands of online content into one easy-to-navigate interface. So TV programmes from iPlayer, 4oD and other online archives are seamlessly brought together with, Boxee claims, more than 40,000 TV episodes available. On-demand TV shows include The Office, Family Guy, Entourage and True Blood, so Boxee provides an appealing solution to getting a vast range of online programmes on your TV.

Boxee Box gives access to a variety of free ad-supported on-demand movies

Web browsing and music streaming

We tried web browsing on the Boxee Box, courtesy of the Boxee browser app, and found it usable although hard to navigate around the screen using the remote. It wasn’t super-speedy but not so sluggish we gave up on it either. Flash content played reasonably reliably too - one area where the Boxee has an advantage over the Apple TV.

We also tried streaming our music collection from a PC connected to our network. While there were some nice features such as the Boxee Box’s ability to automatically add album cover art to tag MP3 tracks, we found it interminably slow to browse our shared music folders, and it crashed a fair few times while we were navigating between tracks.

Verdict

The Boxee Box costs £199 from online retailers. We feel this is quite pricey considering there are other media streamers for around half the price, and unlike its competitors, such as the Western Digital TV Live Hub which includes a 1TB hard drive, it doesn’t include any built-in storage capacity.

On balance, based on our first impressions, we think the Boxee Box is better than Apple TV in terms of the variety of content available and file types supported, but not when it comes to the quality of software and the user experience. Boxee does have other nifty features too, however - you can use your iPhone or Android smartphone as additional remotes for the Boxee Box, for example.

Boxee looks to be actively working to improve the software and iron out bugs and glitches - it releases regular firmware upgrades, the last one in mid-December 2010 - so we expect the platform to get more stable in the future.

One further update: at CES 2011 Viewsonic announced a TV with Boxee hardware inside - and our major reservation about buying any standalone internet TV box at present is that the world of web TV is currently advancing at quite a rate. 2011 will be a year with plenty of new options - including Google TV, which promises to offer even more than Boxee currently does. It's also worth reading our first look review of Apple TV.

Pros: Potentially great hardware and remote, full media support, wide variety of online content

Cons: Occasionally buggy software, cheaper options available