Pros & Cons
-
- Streams online content and media from your hard drive, network storage, or RSS feeds.
- AppBox offers good diversity of content.
- Very expandable.
- Automatically downloads related artwork, reviews, and lyrics.
-
- Annoying navigation.
- Media player performs poorly.
- Many video streams are low-quality.
- Many cool features aren't clearly apparent.
Boxee Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Linux |
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Personal |
Boxee set the standard that Hulu Desktop and YouTube XL followed by giving users a keyboard- and mouse-free way to view online content on your television. Boxee, however, does much more. You can also use it to browse videos, music, and pictures on your computer; stream Netflix; and even watch Major League Baseball games. Its open platform allows for a slew of cool third-party apps that give you access to loads of different content. You get all of this in a sweet-looking interface you can explore with your Apple or Windows media remote. Boxee would be a terrific app if not for its unintuitive navigation and poor media-player controls.
The idea behind Boxee is to push the media you'd normally watch on your computer to your TV, optimally via a DVI/VGA-to-HDMI cable. Boxee works via a collection of apps that pull content from many sources. (The company recently ran into trouble over
You sign up and download the app from Boxee.tv, where you can also add friends to your account and sync it with your Netflix, Twitter, Friendfeed, or Tumblr accounts. You'll also want to download and install Microsoft Silverlight if you plan on watching Netflix through the Boxee interface. If you're running Boxee on an older Windows system, you may also need to update your OpenGL drivers for the software to run.
The app has an eye-pleasing, festive interface, but I'd prefer Boxee spent more time on user-friendly organization and less on pure design. As it is, the app can be irritating to navigate. By default, the main navigation menu is minimized to a tab set to the left side of the screen. To get to the menu to pop it out, you have to click the left button on your remote until you get to the left side of the screen. This quickly gets tedious, especially compared to Hulu Desktop, which lets you toggle between the player and navigation menus just by tapping the Menu button. You flip through much of Boxee's content by paging through screens in and inefficient sequential order; Hulu Desktop clearly categorizes everything in menus so you know exactly where you're going, and can get there with less hassle. The home screen shows you what you've recently viewed through Boxee, what your friends are watching, recently added apps, and recommended apps (which help you expand Boxee's capabilities). There's no section for storing your favorite apps, and you can't add one—there's no way to customize the home screen at all.
Boxee automatically scans your local hard drive and network storage for media, which lets you browse iPhoto and iTunes libraries, as well as videos scattered around on your computer. After it does, a convenient feature kicks in: The application pulls related art, reviews, and lyrics from the Web. I really enjoyed being able to go through my music library and read artists' bios and reviews, or run Boxee like a karaoke machine and sing along to the lyrics on screen.—
Boxee's AppBox
Where Boxee really outshines the competition is its AppBox, a feature like the Apple AppStore where you can find a ton of free Boxee apps to load onto your account. Just choose the ones you want, and they appear in the appropriate section. This gives Boxee the kind of expandability Hulu Desktop and other media centers can't match. You can search for music videos on the MTV app, view friends' photos with the Facebook app, or listen to Internet radio with Pandora's app. With a subscription to MLB.TV Premium you can even watch live baseball games. The diversity keeps things interesting, but the quality completely depends on the content provider. Although videos from the Showtime Podcast app are mostly crisp and clear, Comedy Central videos often looked noticeably pixilated.
By default, you only see apps developed by Boxee and Boxee approved sources. But you can get more by adding repositories for other publishers by clicking on "Add Repositories" from the Repository screen in AppBox and inputting the repository URL. (You can find a list of known Boxee repositories at in Boxee's wiki page.) You can also add RSS feeds to your account and view them with Boxee. These are cool features that add value to Boxee, but aren't apparent by just downloading the app—I had to dig around the wiki to figure them both out. Boxee could really use an in-app user's guide or a series of help videos (like those you'll find in Hulu Desktop) to highlight these functions.
I found Boxee's media player frustrating to use. Seeking through videos or music with it is almost pointless. When you rewind or fast-forward, Boxee skips forward or backward in predefined increments, which makes it hard to pinpoint a specific scene in a video or moment of a song. You also can't jump ahead in the timeline by using your mouse. When you press the player's rewind or fast-forward button, there's sometimes an annoying lag time before the file responds. On the audio side of things, some videos played at the computer's volume and not the volume I set in Boxee. So even if I turned the volume all the way down, the sound would still blare over the computer speakers. Hulu Desktop's video player was much better, letting you smoothly seek through videos and even showing you a small preview box so you know exactly where you are in the video. One plus in Boxee's favor, however, is that most of its content is commercial-free.
Boxee offers a sleek-looking interface and a good variety of media content, but needs to be more user-friendly. I could maybe deal with its navigational quirks, but not the cumbersome player controls. Hulu Desktop is a much better choice for watching commercial online content: It's better organized and has a smoother video player. But Boxee offers a much fuller media experience that extends beyond streaming TV shows. For its apps, diversity of content, and expandability, Boxee is definitely worth an install.
More Personal & Home Software Reviews: