gdgt

I’ve heard a few disappointed reviews (not having Hulu and Netflix) but being in Canada, I’m use to services being blocked because of my country of origin. It’s not the fault of Boxee that services like Hulu, Pandora, iPlayer and Amazon are not available in Canada.

A nice feature in Boxee is the fact you can set it to not display apps which will not work in your country, so you don’t have to see scroll past that Pandora app.

I understand a lot of people are looking forward to Netflix and I’m not sure how the by the end of the statement of it being available for the year will work out and in particular if that includes Netflix Canada. As I don’t use this service, a non-issue for me – but if you love Netflix you’re going to care.

Similarly, I don’t use iTunes therefore I don’t think it’s directly available. I would assume you could just get another computer in your home to download the content and store it to your network.

I’m a person who likes to keep the bits of data on my hard drives. Therefore I have a lot of TV shows, movies and music taking up hard drive space. I love the fact the Boxee allows me to easily access this information and play it. In particular it does a nice job of displaying show photos and including synopsis. For the music it groups and artist albums with photo and then you can see the album art.

The Boxee is geared towards the video and so playing audio is fine but I don’t spend a whole lot of time there, it’s nice they have a 3D – audio level screen saver while music plays – I would like them to offer the ability to choose / load other screen savers (or leave the album art up). I may have missed it (as I haven’t player with this area much) is the functionality to create or play list or have a random play across artist / albums.

Similarly, with no Pandora, I’ve been a little disappointed with the steaming music options. I wasn’t able to get sky.fm, di.fm or even 680news.com to work using the Boxee Browser. I think it’s because these sites spawn new windows for the player and if I get the URL for the pop-up window, then things might work, but again the Boxee player seems to be more about hooking up to your TV and watching things.

Just like your computer, if a TV show is available on a Canadian Channels web site you can watch it via the Boxee Box. In many cases there are apps available (CBC, CITY, Global), the main one that doesn’t seem to exist is CTV. If an app doesn’t exist for the channel you can use the Boxee Browser to go to the site and watch it that way. I’ve done this for SGU on Space.

For me the main reason to get a Boxee Box was to watch the Internet Streaming video: Revision 3, TWiT, College Humour, You Tube, etc. I did find a couple of things I liked to check out that don’t have apps like Laugh or Die, but again using the Boxee Browser solved the problem.

One app I installed on my Boxee, I’ve liked is TVLand. Someone has gone through a lot of effort to find various online sources for TV shows (all kinds) and add them to this app. It’s got a few bugs, the video quality is only as good as the source, and you will still run into the problem of it a site blocks your region, but it’s amazing how many TV shows are available. All kinds of stuff (not to say it good) but fun to just go through and relive your childhood.

A neat feature is the fact your set up Boxee to tie your social feeds, and all those links people send you of online videos are simply a click away from your TV screen.

Clearly the Boxee isn’t perfect. If you’re not a person who watches a lot of online content, it’s probably going to be a waste of your money. Further, if you watch TV shows live or are OK with your existing On Demand Cable box – again you’re not going to see the value of this box. However, if you’re sitting in front of your computer wishing you could be watching this program on your big screen TV (and don’t want your computer always hooked up to the screen) you might want to look into the Boxee.

Some bits of information.

I’ve previously used a DSM-320 to stream video to my living room. The problem I ran into this device was the fact I couldn’t watch live streams. Also the menu’s etc were text based which was fine but not as nice looking as the Boxee

I’ve heard good things about the Roku boxes, but they’re not available in Canada (have the same problem if you buy one in the States and bring it to Canada – blocked) and the Roku (as I understand it) doesn’t support offer the content from your network.

Also the Boxee was unable to play anything I recorded with Windows 7 Media Centre. It DOES play older media center version of files as my wife's wife XP computer files played OK.