content with it. I'm running Boxee on my laptop (1.83 ghz C2D, 2gb ram) and it had been pretty poor, so I'm kinda worried how this experience would be using it on a Boxee box which will probably will be less powerful than my laptop.
Any thoughts?
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I'm thinking about getting a Boxee box and I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on using it to play Hulu or other web browser based…
Hey Chinster - a couple things to take into consideration (that other people have mentioned below, and others they have not).
a) Boxee has hardware accelerated video which your laptop may not. This applies not only for local files and for stuff streaming on the web in Flash 10.1 (that's why 10.1 is a big deal because it makes use of hardware acceleration)
b) we've switched from a Mozilla browser to a WebKit browser to make sure that web pages load very quickly - it's much improved from the current PC version.
c) Due to the ease of piracy on a PC, you're actually going to get more HD content on the Boxee Box in comparison to the PC version.
Also - when's the last time you upgraded Boxee? It doesn't auto-upgrade at the moment, so if it's been a while try downloading the latest version and seeing if that doesn't help performance on your laptop.
Best,
Andrew (at) Boxee (dot) TV
a) Boxee has hardware accelerated video which your laptop may not. This applies not only for local files and for stuff streaming on the web in Flash 10.1 (that's why 10.1 is a big deal because it makes use of hardware acceleration)
b) we've switched from a Mozilla browser to a WebKit browser to make sure that web pages load very quickly - it's much improved from the current PC version.
c) Due to the ease of piracy on a PC, you're actually going to get more HD content on the Boxee Box in comparison to the PC version.
Also - when's the last time you upgraded Boxee? It doesn't auto-upgrade at the moment, so if it's been a while try downloading the latest version and seeing if that doesn't help performance on your laptop.
Best,
Andrew (at) Boxee (dot) TV
Your laptop is running multiple processes. The Boxee Box is design specifically to run the Boxee software and that's all it'll be running. It'll run great. BTW I run boxee on my Dell Studio 17" 2.1GHz Dual Core, 2GB RAM, 64 bit and it runs great!
Your laptop probably doesn't have a discrete gpu capable of gpu acceleration, which is the magic that let's boxee tear through 1080p video while only using 15-30% cpu utilization. The boxee box's intel SoC setup can, and will run much more smoothly. I started using boxee on a 2ghz c2d macbook (no gpu), but now use it on a much older desktop socket939 amd dual core, but with a 9800. Runs much better on the older system with dxva acceleration.
Is it the UI you take issue with? Because that's really not going to change. Boxee uses pieces of mozilla's browser to get video, seamless, but jerry-rigged none-the-less...
If it's performance issues, is your laptop a mac? As flash is absolutely horrid on mac, and will bog down new i5's and such, it is ridiculous. Either way, the same gpu acceleration I was talking about for HD videos is also applied to the web-based flash video, as the intel 4100 probably doesn't have the brute horsepower to handle flash on its own. So web-based videos should also perform more smoothly.
If it's performance issues, is your laptop a mac? As flash is absolutely horrid on mac, and will bog down new i5's and such, it is ridiculous. Either way, the same gpu acceleration I was talking about for HD videos is also applied to the web-based flash video, as the intel 4100 probably doesn't have the brute horsepower to handle flash on its own. So web-based videos should also perform more smoothly.
the Boxee Box is a really good one but you should really look into Popbox, especially with their new one coming out.
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