Apr 20, 2009

Feeling the Boxee Love - Part 2

Okay, so I've been playing with Boxee for awhile now (almost 2 months). I started out with Boxee on Ubuntu Linux and I was really excited to get to use Linux again (and avoid the hardware heavy MS operating systems). Unfortunately, I was plagued with Samba/smb issues & couldn't consistently get the sources to work. Luckily, I was invited to participate in the closed Alpha for Boxee for Windows.

So, I reformatted the hard drive, installed XP & got to work with Boxee! So, a couple things of note here:
  • Don't use UNC names (i.e. \\MyComputer\MyMovies) as a source, map it to a drive instead.
  • Don't map drives to "internal" boxee drive letters (H:, Q:, T:, U: and Z:).
I hijacked my wife's wireless keyboard/mouse to use & it makes life MUCH easier to manage/play. I was extremely impressed with how well the new nVidia software handles connection to a HDTV via DVI=> DHMI adapter. It allows you to "tweak" the settings & nailed the resolution the first time out.

All that being said, a couple other "hardware issues" I had include:
  • An old Athlon XP CPU was not "up to snuff" for playing back DVD or HD content.
  • Wireless (802.11g) introduced additional latency that caused some streaming content to be "jumpy" (especially http://trailers.apple.com).
  • Having a loud computer next to your TV sucks. :(

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