Anyone use a Boxee?

[Steve Poland]

I am looking to cut cable and exploring buying a Boxee. They have a live tv antenna you can get too.

I haven't looked at roku or appletv. Curious of anyone has used a boxee? 

I am hopeful that with Netflix and Hulu plus, we can get all our shows (although need to look if breaking bad, walking dead are available this way at all).

I will miss Sabres games (although some guys told me some tricks for that), and ESPN in the fall for college football.

Thanks for any pros/cons of boxee or others.

--
Steve Poland 
http://twitter.com/popo

[Nicholas Barone]

I think you can still download it for free to your computer to try out before committing to the boxee box

Nicholas Barone

Design Director

716-912-9163

Barone....@gmail.com

[Matthew Lux]

I cut cable January 1st.  The only thing i do miss is sports.  I have a Roku with Netflix and Hulu plug (and HBO Go).

I do not miss cable one bit.  It also gives me more time to READ.

Roku is pretty good overall.  Its cheap and does the trick.

--
Matthew Lux

Web Connoisseur

716.430.0776

GraphicLux.com

[Kevin Purdy]

I used to be a rabid Boxee fan. But Roku is just too darned easy.

And two things you need to know about Boxee:

* They don't offer Hulu. They've been stating that it's been "in the works" for a long, long, long time. Based on the firm's history with Hulu, it may never come.

* They just recently announced that they would no longer develop Boxee as a free software download for DIY boxes. It's all Boxee Box from here on out.

Boxee does have some advantages over Roku: Spotify support, VLC-like support for playing just about any file. But the top-of-line Roku plays MP4 files of any resolution just fine, and offers USB and SD card slots for your download-and-watch pleasure.

- - -

Kevin Purdy

+ Site: http://thepurdman.com

+ Google+: https://bit.ly/kpgplus

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Paul Ehrenreich <pau...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a western digital live that I use for Netflix in the bedroom. Works ok for I need it for

[Steve Poland]

Kevin, with roku what do you do for basic live channels?

[Kevin Purdy]

For whatever reason, I'm one of the folks who get really, really basic cable (all 4 networks, PBS, and a few others) when plugging my internet-only cable into the back of my TV.

If it weren't for that, I'd just invest in a decent HDTV tuner. After that, you have the sports quandry that you would always have.

- - -

Kevin Purdy

+ Site: http://thepurdman.com

+ Google+: https://bit.ly/kpgplus

[Chris Hawkins]

Steve, I'm going to be doing the same thing within 2 months or so
(waiting for tv contract to end). My take on boxee is that when they
first came out it was too buggy, but lately the reviews are much more
positive. Add in the live tuner widget they have now for $50 and it's
time to try it out. If you're still on the fence in two months look me
up and I'll tell you how it's going.

[Paul Ehrenreich]

On Apr 2, 2012, at 1:21 PM, Matthew Lux <ml...@graphiclux.com> wrote:

[Paul Ehrenreich]

I have a western digital live that I use for Netflix in the bedroom. Works ok for I need it for

On Apr 2, 2012, at 1:21 PM, Matthew Lux <ml...@graphiclux.com> wrote:

[Chris Van Patten]

(Not that this would even remotely pertain to any of the upstanding law-abiding citizens in this group...)

It's worth mentioning that recently the TV/video pirating "organizations" banded together to agree to release new content in the MP4 format, which Roku supports flawlessly. I have a last-generation Roku and love it to death, and the ability to drop in MP4s is awesome (from legal sources, of course!).

The document announcing the change in standards is worth looking at. It's pretty amazing to see the level of organization at play in online piracy, relatively openly.

[Adam Romer]

If you're using a Mac, you may also want to look into Plex. I don't currently have a TV at all however, so I can't attest to any of the particular software options. I can say however that I've been quite content with just using Netflix and catching up on previous TV series that I never saw when they were out.

- Adam Romer

[Ilan Volow]

I don't have experience with any other systems, but one of the things that I like about my Roku is that it has lots of unique channels one can add for every kind of interest/ethnicity/creed/deviant behavior imaginable. There's a NHL channel; I don't know if it's any good. http://www.roku.com/nhl

[David Bishop]

I have a bit of experience in this area - I've run mythtv with a PCI tv tuner card[1], boxee (the downloaded version, not the boxee box), and now have two appletv2s w/xbmc. I've had cable tv only intermittently for the last seven years or so.

The first order of business is "Wife Approval Factor", or WAF for short. Feel free to substitute Girlfriend, Boyfriend, Husband, or Sidekick in as necessary. If it's a giant pain to use[2], then it won't be long for this world or your living room. This has gotten better over the last few years, but there is still "nerd usable" vs "real person usable" problems. If your SO is not comfortable learning new UIs, and wants things to Just Work, *and* (crucially) wants to watch sportsball with you, then you're better off with cable. I went the entirety of 2011 without watching a single full baseball game because I was never able to get those "tricks" you mention to work reliably.  If you're fine with your sportsball access being intermittent and possibly crappy or non-existent, then read on. I very recently (like, last week) finally added TV back on my TimeWarner account just to get my beloved Yankee's games back. I also told the kids that the only station we pick up is stations that are currently playing Yankee's games, so they have yet to figure out that we get the Disney channel again[3]. We'll see how long that lasts.

Next, have you hooked an antenna up to your existing TV, to see what channels you get? The boxee attachment isn't magic - if you only pick up PBS and that religious station now, that's all you're getting with boxee as well. At my previous house, less than a mile from where I'm at now, we got one and half channels OTA. Here, if the wind is just right and nobody has touched the antenna since the last time I dialed it in, we can pick up five or six.  We rarely watched the OTA stuff even when that's all we had, so that may not be a big deal for you.

Now, lets say that sports aren't a huge deal, and your SO is understanding of technical difficulties (especially at first). What do you get? Well, my recommendation is the atv2, specifically the one that was just released (1080p!). If you don't have a 1080p tv, and don't plan on getting one soon, you can often pick up the previous gen direct from apple.com refurbished for cheap ($79, I think?). Even out of the box, it's fairly capable. You can buy and rent movies and buy TV shows (including full seasons), it has netflix (of course, my toaster has netflix), it syncs up with icloud/itunes match, and has mlb.tv, nba, nhl, youtube, vimeo, and even flickr support build in (helpful if you're feeling nostalgic for 2006). The mlb.tv app is very nice, but only if you like a team other than Toronto or the Yankees (stupid blackout rules).

Possibly more importantly, it works very well if you've bought into the apple ecosystem. Airplay really does work great - my kids figured out how to hook their iPod touches to the apple tv, to watch funny videos, without me even telling them that it was possible, let alone how to do it. This last weekend, we ended up watching 8 hours of video on the atv2 over two days, streaming via Airplay from my iPhone, without a single glitch (no, it wasn't youtube videos). If you lose the little grey remote, any iphone/ipod touch/ipad will work. And any show that you buy on the tv can be watched on your Mac or iPad.

But most importantly, it's very simple to hack an atv2 and install xbmc. This allows me to plug into my automatic completely-legal-content delivery system. I use a combination of showrss.karmorra.info, flexget, and deluge-torrent to grab my completely-legal-content and drop it onto an nfs server, which I have mounted within xbmc on the atv2[5]. Flexget even has a plugin for prowlapp.com, configurable to send to different accounts depending on the completely-legal-content, so that my wife gets a notification on her iPhone when her show is downloading, and I get notifications for my shows and "our" shows[4]. xbmc will auto fetch things like covers and episode summaries for new shows, so that it looks nice and professional (i.e., it's not just a plain list of directories and file names, *and* it takes pretty much no effort on your part). Oh, and for most shows, we can even watch the same night. This was even more common when we lived in the Mountain time zone, but it's still fairly common for a show to be available to watch the same night it airs.

Final possible drawback - it takes actual forethought and planning to watch something. You can't just sit down with a remote in your hand and flip through channels. Now, I have roughly 2T of video on my nfs server, so pretty much whatever genre-itch I have can be scratched. But if you don't have it downloaded, and you want to watch it *now*, then you're probably sending a few bucks Apple's way. I would also question the "need" to watch something *now*, but whatever.

If you have any further questions, either on my setup or what life is like w/out cable[6], let me know. I'm happy to bloviate at length about things, ask anyone who knows me.

Hope that helps,

David

[1] It's still kicking around somewhere, if anyone wants it. I forget the make/model, but it was the one that was made for linux specifically. I got an EFF sticker with it "Freedom has a Posse".

[2] Measured in terms of number of times your SO asks "How do I do <simple thing X>?" and the answer is "Hold on, I just gotta jiggle <thing y> first, and then it'll be awesome!"

[3] This is true, btw. I don't know what it says that my kids are that gullible, but I'm sure it says something.

[4] I'm proud of this, because I actually modified the existing plugin to support multiple accounts, and got the patch accepted upstream. Go open source!

[5] If I even have time to actually make it to a barcamp, this is probably what I would take about, honestly. It's a pretty sweet setup.

[6] Yes, I have cable now, but like I said, I didn't for six of the last seven years.

[Ryan Mendieta]

That was an excellent write up. I spent a considerable amount of time researching the mythtv route, then got shot down by my luddite wife. So you made a good point.

I have a roku LT though. Like: netlix, vimeo, large channel selection, android remote. Dislike: 720p, no *official* Youtube channel. I ran Plex on my home desktop/server and playback wasn't great (choppy, low quality). Plex was the only server that worked with my roku. I think it is possible to write your own app (channel) that could work better. 

Currently watching Breaking Bad on Netflix (Turtle ep.), and Walking Dead is on there.

If it were my choice though, I'd go the mythbuntu route.

[Dan Magnuszewski]

I've been off cable for 5 years now using HD antenna and a Roku for Netflix, Hulu Plus, etc - only issue is Sabres games. There's a bunch of other free movie apps on Roku as well (Crackle, EPIX, etc).

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:32 PM, David Bishop <da...@gnuconsulting.com> wrote:

[Matthew Lux]

Yeah, That is the only issue is sports.  Even if you get the Hockey package on Roku, it doesn't show Sabres games until after they are 1.5 hours over. (some rules they have).  I have been watching most of my sports via streaming but the quality is pretty crappy.

Roku is coming out with new TV's pretty soon as an add on that is a USB connected to some TV manufactures.

Roku does have TWIT, if you like that kind of dorky, corporate stuff.