NAS drive using Boxee pre-installed

[pettern]

http://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=8 claims to come with Boxee installed on the device (check Specifications->Featured Apps). This is interesting as it runs on a different chipset than the Boxee Box does. Does this mean they use a the linux version or a custom boxee box version? Does anyone know?

[aaronwt]

wouldn't that be the pc version?

It is rather expensive. The two bay version is $495 without any hard drives.

[Ronald]

http://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=8 claims to come with Boxee installed on the device (check Specifications->Featured Apps). This is interesting as it runs on a different chipset than the Boxee Box does. Does this mean they use a the linux version or a custom boxee box version? Does anyone know?

It does seem obvious that they're not using a normal BBox firmware, nor do I think they found it practical to base their own development work on any such firmware since it relies on too many components 'hidden' to anyone without 'insider' connections.

It's much more likely that they based their work on a PC version, and most probably the Linux one (to avoid entanglements with either Apple or Microsoft for dependencies). But it's an open question which version they started with, and how far they may have brought it away from what we're used to on our BBox units.

In the webpage you linked to I only found a few pictures of the Boxee screen, and none of them looked like anything produced by the current BBox firmware, so theirs is either based on a much older version or developed by them for a different visual design.

Whatever the case, it is indeed interesting news to see a new hardware product with specific support for Boxee software (though not only such), and apparently without any involvement from team Boxee, who were never even mentioned in the pages I saw. One can only hope that they (meaning Asustor, not team Boxee) also intend to provide proper software support for that Boxee version.

Best regards: Ronald

[StevenR]

It looks like they may be running an old pre-Boxee Box version of Boxee. If you look at their apps page at http://www.asustor.com/apps and hover over the Boxee icon it says the version is 0.9.25.12.

[Ronald]

It looks like they may be running an old pre-Boxee Box version of Boxee. If you look at their apps page at http://www.asustor.com/apps and hover over the Boxee icon it says the version is 0.9.25.12.

That's disappointing, as it indicates that they're using this very old version without all the improvements added since then.
I never used any 0.9 version much, but from what I've read it had insufficient support for TV shows and NFO files.

And if they didn't bother to get a newer version, then they probably aren't ready to provide good support for it either.

Best regards: Ronald