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Kanisha Dezarn
With the seemingly never ending price increases for cable TV services, readers are often interested in products that offer the promise of eliminating some or their entire cable bill. The new Boxee TV (BTV), available exclusively at Walmart or at the Boxee web site, could be the right solution for some, but will fall short of being a total solution for many.
The Boxee TV is yet another $99 internet media streamer. Like many media streamers, including the recently compared NETGEAR NeoTV and the Roku 2XS, Boxee TV has both Ethernet and wireless network connections. BTV unique value-proposition are its dual OTA (over the air) HDTV tuners to let you view live broadcast TV or unencrypted basic cable signals provided by your cable provider.
The rear panel of the Boxee TV has a number of triangular shaped holes for ventilation. You also find similar ventilation holes covering the majority of the bottom of the device as well as about a third of the top of the device. Even so, the Boxee TV feels quite warm to the touch, though Boxee assures me that it falls within CE heat standards.
After creating and signing into your account, you enter the five digit PIN code that appears on your TV screen. This activates your device and links it to your account. During the account setup process, you are prompted for credit card info to pay for any premium services, such as video rentals or the DVR feature. You have the option of skipping this step.
This menu choice lets you view live TV signals off the air or from unscrambled cable. The available channels in the figure above are from an antenna scan. You can scroll through the channels and click on the key in the center of the navigation rectangle to go to the channel. You also have the option of scrolling down and seeing the schedule lineup for your available channels for the next two time slots.
For my tests, I played back the same recordings (not at the same time) on the Boxee TV device and via my.boxee.tv web site on both my desktop computer and my iPad. On all devices, I noted that at the start of playback, there are some video and audio dropouts as well as times that both the video and audio pause briefly. There are also times when a section of program content is skipped completely.
I had the best playback and fewest interruptions using my desktop. The Boxee TV and the iPad playback experience were approximately the same. I also noted that running the same test at different times during the day yielded either better or poorer results. In general, however, after the first minute or two of watching a recording, video streaming stabilized and the recordings were very watchable on all three platforms. This leads me to believe that there might be some buffering or back-end issues.
Compared to the 263 apps currently included on the Boxee Box, the 12 apps included with the Boxee TV seem almost an afterthought in comparison. The included apps are: AccuWeather; Cloudee; File Browser (for viewing content on attached USB devices); MLB.tv; Pandora; Spotify; TED; vimeo; WSJ Journal and the three featured apps of Netflix, vudu HD and YouTube. When you first scroll over to the Apps icon and select it, the three featured apps appear. To get to the other nine apps, you scroll down one line.
When you launch the File Browser app, your first choice is to select an attached USB device. Thereafter, you are presented with a folder view of your attached storage device. These are the supported files according to Boxee:
As many of my readers know I'm a avid listener of podcasts and one of my favorites mentioned GeekTonic on todays show. HTGuys does a daily HDTV Podcast that covers the news, some reviews and pretty much all HD-related coverage.
They reviewed the always popular, bi-annual TV Season Premiere Guide in quite a bit of depth. If you're a TV fan and like HDTV, be sure and check out the January 9th HDTV Podcast (#344). I listen to most of their podcasts and highly recommend them! This is probably the third time the GeekTonic TV Premier Guide has been mentioned on excellent podcasts - the last time was on the highly recommended EngadgetHD podcast.
By the way, I updated the TV Premiere Listings PDF downloads with several updates and improved formatting. There is a by-date listing and a alpha-by-name listing available for download so be sure and check it out.
For a free app, boxee offers quite a bit to its users. Hulu, Netflix and lots of other online streaming along with media playback using the 10-foot interface. Here are a few screen-grabs for your viewing pleasure: Get the complete scoop at the boxee blog at1/08/2009 10:20:00 AMEmail ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to PinterestLabels:Boxee,CES,htpc,tech newsSageTV Getting Hulu
Hulu has become one of those most asked for applications for Media Devices since Boxee added Hulu support in 2008. At CES, SageTV was doing demos of their pre-release Hulu playback on the new SageTV HD Theater (works in HTPC extender mode or standalone mode). Dave Zatz is covering CES in Las Vegas and was able to stop by the SageTV CES suite to check Hulu on SageTV out. If you like Hulu and want an easy way to get it to your Television or HTPC, read on.
Those of you paying attention to GeekTonic know that Hulu on the HD200 is already possible through the PlayOn UPnP add-on. The problem is the Playon interface on the HD200 in its current form is just plain painful to use and you have to pay Playon to use it past its trial period.
The SageTV guys were showing the hulu support in their CES suite on the SageTV HD200 (both extender and standalone) as well as in Sagetv itself (without the extender. Obviously this is in pre-beta so it will be a short while before it makes it to the general SageTV community. Being in pre-beta we're not positive whether it will work on the older SageTV HD100 extenders or the really old MediaMVP extenders, but it looks like it will work with the HD200's and with HTPC's with SageTV installed - excellent news for sure. I would guess that it will probably work with the HD100s, but we'll just have to wait to see if that pans out.
For those wondering whether SageTV has a direct partnership or like Boxee just using the Hulu's flash player directly, I don't yet have an answer on that. Dave Zatz commented on his blog about technical details and any possible relationship with Hulu.
I really expected to see Netflix Watch Now support before Hulu, but I'm happy with SageTV's choice. Hulu is a very strong complement to the SageTV's HTPC program. You already can watch liveTV, recorded TV, timeshift your TV, commercial detect your TV content etc. Now you can catch those shows you forgot to record or just can't find on the air - right from your TV (with SageTV) and your remote thanks to Hulu. The biggest downside to Hulu on the TV is it's 480p streaming quality, but hey - it's an additional source of content that is free. Very hard to argue with that.
Speaking of CES, be sure and subscribe to ZatzNotFunny so you can keep up with Dave Zatz reports from CES. He's working hard to bring the best stuff from CES. Zatz's Twitter feed is a must-follow as well for CES News
Microsoft continues to put very little marketing focus on their HTPC product built into their operating system. In yesterday's keynote address it seems Microsoft mentioned the "digital home vision", they mostly left Media Center out of the talk - no videos, screen-shots or much talk about Media Center. Sure, Windows 7 (beta available tomorrow, 1/9/2009) is their main new product coming soon, but Media Center is part of that OS product and continuing to ignore Media Center because of lack of perceived interest just begins to be a self fulfilling prophesy.
I know they have some news to talk about with Media Center - perhaps they just can't talk about those things yet. But you'd think they would want to show at least a few screen-shots and mention the new features of Windows 7 Media Center. Disappointing to say the least. I'm not the only one disappointed, the screen-grab at the top of this post is from the twitter feed of Ian Dixon, a very popular Media Center enthusiast.
Elgato's new EyeTV Hybrid USB TV Tuner has improved reception and a FM radio tuner included. The TV Tuner includes a QAM (unencrypted only) 1080i tuning and will sell for $150 along with an included one-year EPG subscription ($20 per year for EPG after first year.)
We've followed the analog hole superhero, Hauppauge HD-PVR for the past year since it was first announced at CES. During that time, the likes of SageTV, BeyondTV, GBPVR, MythTV and MediaPortal all were able to support the HD-PVR. SageTV won the mult-platform support award first with Windows, then Linux and finally Mac support. For those Mac users SageTV was the only way to use the HD-PVR, but now you can use it with the Elagato Eye TV for the Mac.
Actually a beta for EyeTV was released on November 13th and many beta testers have been hard at work since then. It's still in beta, but you can go sign up and try it out if you have a desire to match up your EyeTV HTPC with the Hauppauge HD-PVR. I think we'll see support for one more HTPC software platform in the next few weeks - keep your eye on GeekTonic for that.
The FreshDV podcast has a good interview of Rakesh Agrawal, founder and CEO of Snapstream Media. The FreshDV is a good podcast focused on digital video. In this interview of Agrawal the consumer PVR software, BeyondTV is mentioned, but the focus is on Snapstream Enterprise. It's worth a listen for anyone interested in Snapstream and especially if you're interested in Snapstream's Enterprise Product.
Boxee was a cross-platform freeware HTPC (Home Theater PC) software application with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV. It enabled its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social network services and interactive media related features.
Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source XBMC (now Kodi) media center software which Boxee used as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
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