Boxee Box gets a November 2010 release date

Nick Mertes 12 Jun, 2010 at 7:58pm ET Article published in Tech

If you recall Icrontic’s list of our favorite five things from CES 2010, you will remember that the Boxee Box was our hands-down favorite thing ever and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it.

You also may recall that it was supposed to be out sometime by the first quarter of this year (what we were told at CES). Then it got pushed to second quarter (their official statement). Then we didn’t hear anything for a while.

And now, finally, D-Link announced a release date…sort of.

Earlier this week we got confirmation that the Boxee Box by D-Link will ship this November in US and Canada. We realize many of you have waited months to purchase the Boxee Box, and we know how frustrating this is. Believe us when we say that both Boxee & D-Link want to start selling Boxee Boxes yesterday.

The original plan was to have the Box out by the end of Q2 (i.e. just about now), but that time-frame proved overly ambitious.

Our vision is to make the Boxee experience on a set top box as good as (and where we can, better than) the one you already know on a PC. The goal is to play HD videos from the web or a local network in 1080p and use hardware acceleration whenever possible. And to provide a TV browser experience that can handle almost everything you throw at it, including Flash 10.1. Not to mention making all this happen for an affordable price and on a quiet device that will not feel obsolete 12 months after you buy it.

We are looking forward to the November launch with D-Link and believe it will deliver a user experience that sets the standard for accessing stuff from the Internet and from your home network on your TV.

The Boxee Box is expected to be released in November at a price of $199. For more information about Boxee and the Boxee Box, check out Boxee.tv and D-Link’s Boxee Box product page.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go invent a time travel device to make November get here more quickly.

Comments

12 Jun 2010 ~ 8:07pm Thrax HNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGG--
12 Jun 2010 ~ 8:35pm lmorchard I'm using Boxee on a MacBook Pro attached to my HDTV right now, so I kinda want one of these. (Though I wish it didn't look like a cube melting into the shelf)

A little worried for those guys, though, since it'll probably be about that time the $99 Apple TV (iPhone-without-a-screen) and Google TV devices start hitting shelves.
12 Jun 2010 ~ 9:04pm Thrax Les, does it upscale to 1080p with XviD/DiVX/H.264 files? Is the quality good?
12 Jun 2010 ~ 10:57pm mertesn Forget the Apple TV. The Apple TV doesn't even play 20% of the media I own. Boxee plays 100% of it. And the Boxee interface is much better. And you can write programs to make it do even more.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 12:24am ardichoke Meh... already have one. It's that computer lookin box next to my TV with Boxee installed on it...
13 Jun 2010 ~ 1:21am djmeph I wish Boxee would have put more effort into fixing their software bugs before releasing this. The whole point of Boxee is that it's supposed to do everything and play all of you media, which I commend them for. However, there is a major flaw with their audio interface that is causing an issue for a slew of users who have AC3/DTS compatible sound systems. They don't even seem to be responding to the thread about the issue in their own forum.

http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=100

In the meantime I'm still using VLC to play anything with 5.1 sound.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 1:56am ardichoke I agree with djmeph. Their software is far from stable or reliable in my experience, but they're on to pushing out the box. I've more or less stopped using it and went back to the infinitely more reliable XBMC, which Boxee is based on anyway. I don't know how they can be based on such a rock-solid and proven code base but turn out such a buggy, unreliable app.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 9:37am mertesn The software is still in Beta, and the box isn't being released until November. You can do an amazing amount of bug fixing in that time. Even if there are still bugs (which there certainly will be), software updates will be made available after the product is released.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 10:13am drasnor This product has been leap-frogged.
My parents own one of these TVs and the YouTube integration, Netflix streaming, and Windows Media Server integration all work flawlessly.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 11:05am Snarkasm And it was only a minimum of $2700!

(You were joking, right? For all the people that already have TVs, and comparing a $200 device to something 14 times as expensive?)
13 Jun 2010 ~ 12:39pm lmorchard

Thrax wrote:

Les, does it upscale to 1080p with XviD/DiVX/H.264 files? Is the quality good?

Boxee on my MBP does all the above, and I can use my iPod Touch as a remote control. Apple TV? Who knows, though it probably will claim to summon unicorns capable of performing fellatio. Google TV? Well... it'll probably offer zebras with braces, but the zebras will be cool to hang out with.
13 Jun 2010 ~ 6:41pm Cliff_Forster Boxee Box, it may not perform fellatio, but it has allot of content that can teach ya.... I'm just sayin....
13 Jun 2010 ~ 9:15pm drasnor

Snarkasm wrote:

And it was only a minimum of $2700!

(You were joking, right? For all the people that already have TVs, and comparing a $200 device to something 14 times as expensive?)

It is now, but at the present rate of progress I wouldn't be surprised to see similar functionality in all of the larger TVs this time next year.
14 Jun 2010 ~ 3:08am ardichoke

mertesn wrote:

The software is still in Beta, and the box isn't being released until November. You can do an amazing amount of bug fixing in that time. Even if there are still bugs (which there certainly will be), software updates will be made available after the product is released.

Understand all that. My gripe was that they seem to have stopped working on the software completely to push out the box. Since they started by making a cool software platform, it just seems to me like they should work out the bugs before they get hung up making a gadget. I don't think they've released an updated version of their software since before I built my HTPC (almost 6 months ago). Doesn't seem to me like they give a crap.
14 Jun 2010 ~ 8:19am mertesn The latest version is 0.9.21.11487 which was released in April. They've added a ton of features and bug fixes in that build.

If you're curious, their development roadmap is here. It should provide some visibility on their progress.

Boxee is progressing well, and the number of outstanding issues before a 1.0 release is quickly dropping.
14 Jun 2010 ~ 8:55am NullenVoyd This article actually reminded me to try boxee on my HTPC the other day and while I like the layout and direction it looks headed, I could not get the thing to play any streamed vid with any note of smoothness, either due to frame skipping or the stream cutting off frequently. I'll fully admit my setup isn't the best, but xbmc runs much better playing the same media for me.

I think with a fixed platform to develop on (the boxee box), they should have a much more reliable base to build from, but it will definitely be interesting to see how it works when released.
15 Jun 2010 ~ 7:26pm ardichoke Hmm... that's strange. When I've tried to install their packages recently it tells me it's still the same version that I installed well before April. I really wish they would open a PPA repo for Ubuntu instead of just direct download for their packages. It would make trying to keep their updates straight so much easier.