It’s been around two years since I use Boxee. When I discovered it, I bought an Acer Revo, and powered Boxee on a freshly installed Ubuntu system.
That was working well and I got a cheap full-featured media-center that way, but there was still a couple of rough edges:
- The thing is a bit noisy
- Flash HD videos were unable to play correctly
- No real remote controller (the iPhone/Android app is great, but well, it’s not as good as a real remote).
- Running a complete Ubuntu system to power a media-center always sounded overkill to me
I was a bit hesitating though: would the Boxee Box be that better than my home-made station? I’ll have the same software afterall, is the hardware they’ve designed with D-Link worth the change?
There was only one way to know it, so, I finally bought the little not-really-square monster, the Boxee Box. Since yesterday, it replaces elegantly my Revo and the small green-smiley-face-logo shines in the dark. Here are my first impressions.
- It’s very small and elegant, you really want it to be visible :) It’s classy
- It’s completely silent, very good point
- The remote changes everything, really
- Flash HD videos play smoothly
- The software is actually not the same, it’s a complete firmware dedicated to the box, and it’s better organized than the opensource version of Boxee (very nice feature: the internal search engine and the UPnP support).
So if you’re looking for the ultimate media-center, stop searching it exists, and is called Boxee Box!
