Boxee Beta now public
As we’ve mentioned before, Boxee threw it’s hat into the settop box ring, and from the looks of what they’ve got on tap, it’s one of the better options.
The announced Boxee Box hardware (made by DLink) will have HDMI out, and support 1080p video to your television, using the horsepower of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset, and support a myriad of file formats, networked content and streams from online sources. The cut off cube look is just begging for a “Weighted Companion Cube” mod, and is actually small enough that you can hold it in one hand. Really, it’s small. As an added bonus, the simple remote has a QWERTY keyboard on the flipside. All of this for under $200 US strikes me as the best bang to buck ratio for a settop box as long as you don’t need live TV recording.
Of course, what makes Boxee really tick is it’s software, and they’ve now opened the beta program to the general public. Although the alpha version worked well, the beta version is much improved, and I would put it on par with Windows Media Center. Luckily the two can exist happily together. In some ways better, although Boxee doesn’t support TV tuners for live TV. You don’t have to be hooked up to an HDTV to enjoy Boxee though. The beta is available as a free download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Funny…Doug and I both have Logitech Harmony remotes. It’s worth mentioning that Doug has to me, on severl occasions that “The only thing that would make this remote perfect would be if it had a keyboard on it.” now that Boxee has actually done it, I wonder if were going to see the idea rolled out into oter brands and devices.
In the meantime…I’m seriously considering cancelling my cable accout andgetting one of these instead.
Rumour has it that they’ll be selling the remote separately with a USB dongle. Not sure what type of wireless type it’ll be, or the price, but it might be a not bad solution. There’s something else from CES that also looks interesting, that I want to try before passing judgement on though.
[…] Boxee Beta now public […]
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