Would spend thousands of $ on Boxee?

[chackett]

I just built a box for experimenting with htpc / boxee, and I would LOVE a guide that gives examples of how the get the most out of Boxee. Something like a "A Tivo Lovers Guide to Boxee."

After years and years and years of faithful Tivo use, I'm willing to adapt to Boxee and try to make a transition, but I really need some help with things like locating popular (primetime / mainstream / broadcast network) feeds. I don't have any idea what torrents are or how to use them (or if they're legal, or how to tell which ones are or aren't).

For example, we wanted to watch season 1 of Burn Notice cause we didn't get into the show until season 2. Couldn't find it anywhere, but eventually paid $13 to get it at the Amazon digital media library. Works great and we stream it through FireFox, and it's great. But it's not Boxee. How can I get that content into Boxee?

I assume there are a bunch of "best practice" guides that might be useful. Here's a great example .. it took me several days to figure out how to rip a dvd into my library. I still might not be doing it right. I didn't know I had to set the region on my dvd player, didn't know I had to install some sort of restricted drivers / decoders, etc.

Another example is my video settings. I found the Intel Graphics guide and followed the "Safe" recommendations, and it changed our Boxee experience from "tolerable" to "Quality." My wife went from saying "It's not _that_ bad to saying "This is just like watching TV!" Had I not stumbled onto that guide we might have given up on Boxee. Now I'm struggling with mouse movements and tracking in the menu system of Boxee being really slow. Video playback and streaming are excellent, but menu responsiveness is very weak. Maybe it's my old school ps/2 style mouse. I'll try a USB.

Well, forgive my babbling, but I thought I would share some of my "newbie" experience. I'm not a techno wiz, but I'm no Luddite either. I'm generally an early adopter, but have some pretty high expectations for stuff I try out.

Overall, I'm really excited about Boxee, particularly considering my app still says "Alpha" on it So I understand we're not even in Beta yet. I just need some help using the tool. It's like someone gave me a hammer and told me to build a house without any blueprints.

Chris

[iBog]

I don't stream media from the Internet (though I did just discover the youporn app that works from Canada). I use Boxee strictly for local media stored on my NAS. I rip all my DVDs to ISO images and download from the Internet. In a sense, this is a DVD/VCR/PVR replacement. The NAS is the entertainment hub allowing me to share everying with other TVs in my home.

Boxee has performed very well for me on my Apple TV. One of my primary beefs is how Boxee catalogs and indexes local media. I'm still waiting for the day it will recognize metadata on my videos (I'm hopeful since it supports ID3 in music now).

I don't expect Boxee to support TV tuners, but the option to stream from Sling or MythTV would be nice. In the meantime, I hit the source button on my TV remote to switch to the cable or antennae for live news and sports. I ancitpate higher quality video podcasts for the evening news soon.

My TV watching habits have changed significantly. I watch something when it's convenient for me and without commercials. Less channel surfing trying to find something to watch. I watch less crap. I also have marathon sessions of watching multiple episodes one after the other.

[beyondzero]

Here is what I did:

1) Put together a $500 PC (Ubuntu) via parts from Newegg with a plan to move off cable completely within 2 months. My cable bill (all movie channels, HD DVR, second cable box in the bedroom) without Internet was costing me $160/month. DSL+analog phone costs me $60/month. Ideally, the savings would make the Boxee PC generate an ROI within 5 months, given the two months I estimated to wean the girlfriend from the Comcrap DVR. For my remote I purchased a Streamzap PC remote & IR receiver, and actually use my Logitech Harmony with the Streamzap IR receiver.

2) I moved the Comcrap DVR to the bedroom and connected cable directly to the TV so we could watch local News and use Boxee for everything else. DVR in the bedroom guaranteed the Very Concerned Girlfriend would not miss So You Think You Can Dance and other crap.

3) Purchased a tabletop digital antenna for the HDTV. Our reason: we want sports, local news, and PBS. Could only get one station and it was barely viewable. Realized I was going to need a rooftop antenna (hello 1970s!) or would have to keep cable.

4) Purchased a Haupauge HD WinTV Capture card and installed Myth on the the Boxee PC. Added a cable splitter and connected Cable to get the local HD networks and PBS.

5) Subscribed to Schedules Direct ($20/year) and added Mythweb and now have a functional DVR/Internet Media PC.

Total cost: $650, plus $20/year to Schedules Direct. I reduced Comcrap Cable to "Limited Basic" (they do not advertise this tier but it exists) which costs $19.95/month. This way I can get the local HD networks (news, sports) as well as PBS. Boxee works OK as a Myth front-end (search the forums for info).

For other shows, say non-broadcast-network programs, I get via torrent. On another PC running Ubuntu I added KTorrent which supports RSS and RegEx. I have it watch bt-chat.com RSS feed and have RegExs for all of my shows. I then share out the download directory and tell Boxee to watch that dir.

Issues:

1) As others said, Boxee is alpha so we are all testing it. It locks up my PC and crashes it occasionally. As bugs are resolved, new ones arise. My girlfriend is comfortable ssh'ing to the machine and restartng Boxee, hoping on via VNC and using her laptop when the remote stops responding. I sometimes have to talk her through resolving difficult bugs when I am not around.

2) My setup is HDMI from the Boxee PC to a 50" plasma. Getting audio to work was non-trivial (search the forums). Getting the PC capture card to work with Myth was very difficult (Myth and linux capture card documentation is pretty crappy). Just to put things in perspective, I am a linux guru of sorts and it still took me a month to get everything working (mostly). My girlfriend is also geek friendly and patient. Having the fall-back plan ("your shows are still on the Comcrap DVR, but it is just in the bedroom, honey") gave me some time to tweak.

3) If you care about local news or sports you'll need either a rooftop antenna (unless you live in the rare places where indoor antennas actually work) or will need to keep SOME cable. Assuming you care about HD content, of course.

One and a half months after this began, I downgraded my Comcrap service by over $130/month and returned the DVR and second cable box. It felt great and in 4 more months my savings from Cable have fully paid for my Boxee PC.

BTW I am totally screwed re: the girlfriend if someone doesn't regularly upload torrents of Project Runway when it returns on Lifetime in a month or so. So keep in mind what you (and your household) watches and have a plan for how to get it.

If only I could buy shows a la carte directly from the networks. Boxee needs to take to heart the recently tweeted article on how now to blow it (like TiVo did). Please do NOT let the old media companies ruin Boxee in order to preserve their antiquated business model (bundled-programming cable). I would like 3 shows from HBO, 2 from Bravo, one from Showtime, an unlimited package from SyFy and stream them over the Internets to Boxee, paying just for what I watch!

[ownZero]

Just wanted to mention that as far as "roof-top" antennas go, there is the option of doing an "inside attic" antenna if you are in a house with one.

I put this one in my attic some months ago and it gets good reception. I had to use a compass to angle it in the best direction using antennaweb and needed an amplifier to boost the signal for a couple stations.

I know there are a huge number of factors with antenna reception but if an indoor set-top one doesn't do it and you think your are within range of the local broadcast towers, an attic mounted antenna might be the way to go. With an attic mount there is no need to worry about grounding or weather-exposed hardware and cable connections.

I just needed a short mast and bracket to connect it to a rafter. Then ran some coax to a few rooms and I got rid of my cable TV completely.

Boxee is connected to a modest HTPC on one TV and works well for hulu and netflix barring the occasional glitches. Netflix snailmail and streaming helps supplement for additional content.

[panamamike]

So, here is the deal. I have finally convinced my wife to drop cable. My plan is to spend a fairly large amount of money to build 3 machines and monitors to use as TV's, HTPC, etc. My plan is to run Boxee as the "OS". My question to you is, do you feel Boxee is where is needs to be to drop cable and run full time? I REALLY don't want to spend money only to find out it is not really where it needs to be. I have run it for a little while on my MacBook Pro, and it seems to work about 70% of the time, but I am wondering if that is due to my lower end machine. Anyone got any thoughts?

I built a Win7 Box with decent specs and I'm running it up against my Sat setup.
The idea was to do a test run and see if I could replace my sat with the PC and cut the Sat cord. Here's what I've learned.

1: You want to do a test like this to ensure you have enough internet bandwidth. Turns out raw speed isn't enough. There are issues with how particular websites are routed by your IPS and the quality of the signal. For example, I have 4.5MBps connect, yet I still get choppy online playback. I've been trying to defeat this issue for quite some time now and no luck. There are people with no issues at all, but they don't necessarily know why they are getting smooth video.

Also note, you will only be able to stream so may video streams at one time. Each one takes at least 1Mbps, maybe more to be smooth. You also have to take into account whatever other traffic you have on your network.


2: If you're able to get a system up and running smoothly note that you may still have to deal with bugs. I've found that various apps are really cool, but have certain bugs that make the system less than robust. It's one thing to run hulu or boxee for a day or a few hours. It's another thing to rely on it. You'll have to get used to the idea of doing a reboot here and there and possibly having to do some troubleshooting when unexpected things happen.

3: Limited content: Unless you decide to pay for some online streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon, the choice of programing is pretty limited. The biggest gap being ESPN for sports. For me, it's not that big a deal since I'm not used to having HBO and Showtime. I have OTA tuners for my HD primetime fix.

I really like Boxee, but I'm not sure it's quite there yet. YMMV, it depends on your WAF and your own patience

Mike

[pmow]

I run Boxee on a tower, and after switching out to different video cards, Boxee is a lot more stable. I would tweak the hardware a little and it should be stable enough to use 100%.

After your hardware is stable, you need content. If you are okay with getting items an hour late, take a look at torrents or newsgroups. I'm not aware of a torrent auto-downloader, but sabnzbd is a great tool to auto-download from newsgroups. Most programs are on there.

[risech]

What are you running, PC, Linux, Mac? What is the one thing you really dont like about it?

I think so.

[boxeemonkey]

I have run it for a little while on my MacBook Pro, and it seems to work about 70% of the time, but I am wondering if that is due to my lower end machine. Anyone got any thoughts?

Low-end? I dont think so. Unless its a PowerBook, that MBP is more than enough.

I thought about building a dedicated HTPC, but I am hoping someone comes out with a Boxee box. I wish Roku box would support Boxee, that would be awesome.

[homerj742]

We dropped cable and use boxee. I'm getting an antenna for OTA channels for live news and of course sports.

So far, we've been satisfied with Boxee, we just had realistic expectations with an alpha release. Sometimes Hulu doesn't work, a few hours later, it will start working again. etc...

[btros]

Boxee just crashes WAY too much, like almost every time I try to watch a movie or browse my hard drive. It's nowhere near ready to use as a primary player.