Boxee Box Web-connected media streamer in hands-on photo action

The Boxee Box is one of the most highly anticipated pieces of home-cinema hardware ever. Can it bring everything we need to our TVs? We sure hope so...

Ian Morris

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Ian Morris

Oct. 4, 2010 8:18 a.m. PT

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The Boxee Box has to be one of the most anticipated pieces of home-cinema hardware in recent years. It brings the social media system Boxee together with some stylish hardware from D-Link to produce a set-top box that pipes movies, music and apps to your TV in magnificent style.

Since it was announced -- and demoed at CES this year -- the guts of the Boxee have changed considerably. Initially an Nvidia Tegra 2 was going to be running the show, but it was found to be unable to process high-quality H.264 video. Now it's an Intel Atom chip on board, which leads to some interesting questions over what else you could use the hardware for, were you a fan of hacking things.

You may notice that the surface of the Boxee is no longer a gigantic ~~fingerprint magnet~~ mirror. Also missing is the second USB socket on the front underside of the box, but there are two sockets on the rear now.

With Apple TV almost certain to add apps at some point and Google TV entering this market it's no surprise the Boxee has lots of plug-in options for making it more impressive. In our demo, we saw a YouTube app, as well as features that allow the Boxee to grab video from on-demand TV services such as BBC iPlayer.

Video playback looked good to us, but we'll reserve judgment until we see one up and running in our test environment. We adore the idea of having a much more graphical user interface for our video files, and we think this could make finding stuff to watch much easier. We're also excited by the options for online catch-up services. In a way, this could be a much more useful version of YouView, with access to much of the same content but far better media-streaming options.

The box will cost an anticipated £200 in the UK, although we're told that's a promotional price, and could well rise after an initial discount period. It's interesting to note that the US price is $200, leading us to complain once again that someone besides George Osbourne is having a laugh at our literal expense. That aside, have a good click through our hands-on photos and see what's what with the Boxee Box.

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This cube is the Boxee Box box.

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But this melted-looking chap is what you'll take out of the box. We think this unique style is incredibly cool, if a little hard to fit in with the rest of our home cinema.

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Instructions are for losers.

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The underside of the Boxee is a non-slip green rubber.

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Outputs and sockets are minimal -- after all, there isn't much spare space here -- but Ethernet backs up the built-in Wi-Fi. HDMI does 1080p at 60 frames per second, so full HD video is a reality. There are stereo and optical digital outputs too, and USB provides another way to get video in.

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An SD card slot gives you another option for putting media on the device.

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The remote uses RF to control the Boxee Box, but aside from that, is pretty unremarkable...

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...except that on the back is a full keyboard for text input and configuration. This is by far the best, most elegant remote we've seen for a device like this. None of that multi-key tapping to enter text. This could be very significant in getting a quality Internet experience on your TV.

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Multi-user logins are possible too, which means everyone in the family can have a profile to store their personal preferences.

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Menus look clean and easy to understand in this pre-release version.

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Movie information is scraped from IMDb in what the D-Link team described as "magic". It involves pixies or elves or something.

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The library is one of those features missing from every other media player we've seen. It's possible to add third-party versions to the Popcorn Hour, but it's far from easy and never works as you might hope.

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Access to services such as BBC iPlayer is possible too, which is a real bonus as most media players don't offer this sort of functionality.

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Apps include access to popular content. Writing apps is reasonably simple, and Boxee says there are quite a lot of them now.

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Unfortunately the YouTube app sucked, insisting on showing Google adverts in the middle of the screen. Seriously, this doesn't work at all, and we hope something happens to make this problem die a horrible death as soon as possible.