The Boxee Box Review

Trouble at the Main Event

Loading shows is slow. It’s not unbearable, but definitely not instantaneous. As you’ll see in the YouTube video I’ve embedded below, it took me around 25 seconds to start playing content once I’d selected it. That’s not exactly quick. Doing the same on a modern PC would take about 14 seconds (including loading a webpage and hitting play on the embedded video player.

It’s not just performance though, there are clear bugs in the software. I tried watching Conan and once I took it full screen elements of the webpage behind the full screen window would appear as thin white lines on top of the video.

Sometimes I’d try to watch a show (not on Fancast) and the full screen option was missing. No matter how many times I backed out and reloaded the full screen option just wouldn’t be there. I’d have to reset the Boxee Box to get it back.

Watching an episode of The Jersey Shore (Boxee made me do it) I encountered a strange stuttering problem. The audio remained in sync while video just chopped away. Exiting full screen mode usually alleviated the problem but sometimes it didn’t.

Sometimes you’d get a video that would just stop animating for a few seconds. Audio keeps going but the video just stops completely only to pick up a few seconds later.

A few times I’d be watching a show and audio would drop out halfway through watching it. There’s absolutely nothing you can do when this happens, absolutely nothing. Most shows won’t remember where you left off and most don’t support fast forward properly so you have to leave the browser, re-enter (or sometimes reset the Boxee Box) and watch the entire show again to get back to where you were.

While the fast forward function doesn’t work in the vast majority of cases, you can do it in the old fashion way. First, back out of full screen view to the browser with embedded video. Using the dpad on the remote you can move a mouse cursor to the progress bar in the embedded video player and use the center button on the remote to pick a time that’s close to where you left off. It’s an absolute pain to do this but it technically works. And therein lies the problem. Boxee’s ease of use falls apart when you have to deal with loading web pages, manually going into full screen mode, backing out when audio stops working, dealing with artifacts on the screen and having to occasionally restart the box.

The Boxee Box does have a tendency to crash a lot depending on what you’re doing. A lot of the background indexing can sometimes hang the system and force a reboot of the entire machine without any warning (which you’ll see a few times in the video above).

Every layman I showed the Boxee Box was put off by its performance and finicky behavior, usually saying something like “this is really slow, don’t give it a good review”, “this is stupid why is it in a little window like that? don’t give it a good review” or “are you going to give this thing a good review?”.

It’s easy to use for me and I think if you know how it works it’s not hard to get around its quirks, but dealing with these issues isn’t intuitive. People are used to just turning on the TV, picking the channel they want and watching a show. Boxee changes the way you choose content (you pick the show rather than the channel) but the watching a show part is made more complicated in the process, and that isn’t acceptable.

I should add that not all of it is Boxee’s fault. Ultimately all Boxee does is interact with the underlying webpage that embed the video content. This does limit what Boxee can do (e.g. fast forward). However I haven’t encountered nearly as many issues with video on the web on my Macs and PCs as I did with the Boxee Box.

When it works, it is actually very nice. You get a lot of shows, not necessarily the most current stuff on cable TV, but you get it all for free. Boxee does a good job organizing it and presenting it in a clean manner. There’s potential here, but in its current state the Boxee Box needs work. The good news is that Boxee has been incredibly proactive and transparent in its handling of bugs, which is more than I can say for many larger companies that compete in the CE space. Chances are if you have a bug you can reach someone who cares at Boxee who will eventually get it fixed. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re fine with paying $199 for something that needs a few software updates already.

About Hulu

Boxee and Hulu have inked some sort of a deal to bring Hulu Plus to the Box. That means at some point, for $7.99 per month, you’ll get access to Hulu Plus on Boxee. It’s cheaper than cable at least.

If you want to however, you can use Boxee’s browser to navigate to Hulu.com and watch videos for free. Boxee doesn’t make it easy to do since the web browser is very slow, but it is possible.

You have to navigate to Hulu.com using the Boxee browser and search for the show you want via a super tiny interface. Thankfully you get a nice overlay for entering in text fields on web pages, which helps move things along.

Other content owner websites worked as well, although with varying degrees of success. With NBC I had stuttering video playback at times and had a lot of problems trying to get an ad to go away while watching The Office. Watching House on Fox’s website was mostly flawless.

I hate to say it but Boxee could stand to have some sort of a mouse as an input. I’m guessing a trackpad is probably the easiest to integrate into the current remote design.