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Boxee on Apple TV

Boxee on the Apple TV: Initial Impressions

The following is an account of my experience with the Apple TV. I had been eying this device for a while and recently had an opportunity to get one that I couldn’t turn down. My interest in the Apple TV was to use it as a media center for my collection of movies and TV shows. Up until I got the Apple TV my primary media center was a Western Digital Media Player (which I’ll refer to as the WD-MP). The WD-MP device has served it’s purpose perfectly but has a few major flaws that consistently had me looking at other devices.

What is Boxee you ask?

So it appears I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself. Boxee is a Media Center software platform that is built with a social networking aspect. Boxee plays media from your computer and other devices in your home network, as well as connect you to various Internet sources that allow you to stream or download movies, tv shows, music and photos. Anyone is able to download this software directly to most Windows, Linux or Mac based systems and there are a number of specialty-device installs (including one for Apple TV). To learn more visit the Boxee Home Page.

The Western Digital Media Player versus Boxee + AppleTV, making the switch:

I want to start by pointing out that the Boxee + AppleTV solution is not for everyone. I will be discussing reasons you may want to avoid the Boxee + AppleTV solution after going through the list of what is important to me in a hardware-based media center solution:

1.) Accessibility: Plays many different media formats (iso, divx, avi, wmv, mkv, mp4, etc.) – I just need something that is flexible based on my needs. Overall the WD-MP really accommodated this need well, so when it came to switching I needed what ever I switched to to do the same or better. Boxee supports all of the same formats but does have a hard time processing mp4 and mkv files if the hardware isn’t top of the line. Unfortunately mp4 and mkv files tend to stutter on the Boxee + AppleTV (but that isn’t a huge issue for me at this time as I have very little of this type of content).

2.) Support Many Devices and/or Support Network Devices: It needs to play many external devices that can be loaded on the fly. This is the first area where I ran into a snag with the WD-MP. It only had 2 USB ports and the device has an internal logging system that cataloged all of the media so load times on a 1TB drive could be long (5-10 minutes) on each first use. Now once it was indexed it was very fast and responsive, I just update media so often that it made updating content a pain. This is where the Boxee + AppleTV solution blows away the WD-MP, while the physical device only has 1 USB port, it has both wireless and a CAT5 network jack. This allows me to access any drive I have shared over my local area network. With 4 drives shared this is the first TV-based solution that easily allows me to access all drives. I will focus more on this a little later.

3.) HDMI compatible: It needs to have HD (preferably over HDMI). Again the WD-MP accommodated this need well. The Apple TV has HDMI and meets my needs as well.

4.) Cheap: It had to be reasonably priced. I have yet to see a media player device pack the power of a WD-MP for as low of a price. The WD-MP generally runs between $80-$100 in fact here is a Western Digital Media Player from Buy.com for less then $100 + shipping.

5.) Subtitles: Subtitle support was also a need for me. As the owner of the Asian film enthusiast site Asian Film Club, it is very important for me to be able to watch movies with very good subtitle support. The WD-MP was alright, but it required that you had .srt subtitles. Unfortunately other subtitle formats were not supported which meant searching the web for correct subtitles. Again this is another one where Boxee + AppleTV is so much better because it has a built in subtitle search system that goes online and shows you all of the available subtitles. So far I have been super impressed by the quality and vast selection that it has found (in over 20 movies now it has found something for each one).

6.) I want to watch online content on my TV. I want to access it all; Hulu, PBS, Cartoon Network, The Guild, and so much more! And I want all of this from my TV not from the computer chair! Well the WD-MP simply cannot even do this. Since it cannot even connect to a network. This is another one of the reasons I went with the Boxee solution (notice I left AppleTV off the end of that one). The AppleTV by itself is kind of crap. It is just a horribly overpriced piece of hardware with limited functionality, but when Boxee is added it totally opens up the device and turns it into a truly awesome media center.

7.) Easy: It needs to be easy enough for a 4 year old. My son loves watching cartoons and movies. A Media Center has been a good way to provide selective video content to him. He was able to use the WD-MP but I know he would pick things more on remembering where things are. So when things got moved around or the wrong hard drive was plugged in it confused him. Now that is not a problem at all! We have directories that are clearly his that are always there now since we don’t need to swap drives anymore, I can change the images that display so in addition to word recognition he can see visual clues, and being that it is Apple hardware there are only 6 total buttons on the remote so it is hella easy for him to use it.

8.) A good quality User Interface: One of the first things that annoyed me with the WD-MP was the limitations in the interface. My guess is they decided to invest energy in a good quality player and UI wasn’t much of a thought. Well Boxee (being all about software) has clearly spent a ton of time making their UI very good. While still not perfect (at least until they have a fully easily customizable UI option) it is very nice in it’s current state. Many things are right where you expect them to be and it is very easy to navigate.

9.) Thumbnails, Previews and Ratings: In the WD-MP the thumbnails never worked, you were limited to hitting play on a movie if you wanted to see a preview, and forget about ratings since it has no capabilities to check the Internet for them. Well Boxee (being all about software) has clearly spent a ton of time making their content management system very good. It does a great job using online resources to bring you trailers (great for previewing a movie you don’t entirely remember), It pulls in thumbnails for you for all movies, tv shows, and music. And to top it all off it pulls down general information on all of these forms of content as well including background, director info, year it was made, actors info, and ratings. It even allows you to rate a movie when you finish watching it!

There are some disadvantages to the Boxee + AppleTV solution that don’t really bother me all that much, but may be important to other people:

1.) You are against “hacking”: Technically the Boxee + AppleTV solution is a hack-based solution so if you have a problem with software hacking it may not be the right solution for you. Apple does not support the modification of its systems so a third party hack is needed to install Boxee on the AppleTV.

2.) Moderate Install Process: I like to think of myself as a technology savvy person and it took me over an hour to get the solution up and working (due to using a new installer that wasn’t completing the process correctly). Beyond that I am not going to get into the finer details of the hack, if you are looking for that information it can be found at http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

3.) High-End HD content kinda sucks on this solution. If you are playing a lot of MKV and MP4 files (especially when playing over the network) you will likely be disappointed by the choppiness of the content. I mentioned before that I don’t have a ton of this content so it really doesn’t bother me).

At the current time these are really the only complaints I have with the new solution. There are so many more things that the Boxee + AppleTV solution can do and I really have only cracked the surface.

Here is my ranking of both solutions side by side: