More Boxee Love - My BoxeeBox

Okay, so to alleviate the issues from my previous post, I'm building a "new" BoxeeBox for use as my primary Media Center. Here are the parts I'm getting:

• Case: Athena Power CA-1015IS30 (MicroATX)
  
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-US2H
  
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200
• RAM: Use existing 2GB DDR2 sticks
  
• Hard Drive: Use existing IDE for boot + 500GB MyBook for storage initially.
  

Several GREAT features of this motherboard:

• Integrated 780G chipset (which includes the Radeon HD3200) and is discussed in-depth at Tom's Hardware Guide.
• HD3200 features an embedded Universal Video Decoder (UVD) providing hardware decoding support for MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1!!! Given this sort of hardware support, Tom's said that you could even use an AMD Sempron 3500+ to play back Full-HD.
• HDMI Output direct to HDTV
• eSATA connection for fast access to external storage

Also, on a whim, I saw a great deal on a refurb Sony Blu-Ray drive at Buy.com ($69.99)and so I picked one up. The Blu-Ray drive got here late last week, but the rest of the parts aren't scheduled to appear until Tuesday/Wednesday. I'll fill you guys in with a more detailed report, once I get the Case/MB/CPU in-hand & start the build!

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. :(
  

So much for MythTV, I'm loving Boxee!!!

Okay, I wrote quite some time ago about my experimentation with MythTV & my pursuit of a HTPC (Home Theater PC). So, the initial requirement was to be able to play my DVD's, CD's & look at pictures on my 56" TV in the living room. MythTV met this goal, but also added quite a bit of complexity when you factor in the PVR functionality that it provides.

So, after weeks of playing with MythTV, I've been turned on to Boxee! Boxee is quite simply, a digital media player, that allows me to do the following:

• Play existing Movies - DVD, ISO, mpeg
  
• Play existing Music - CD, mp3
  
• Browse Photo slide-show
• Watch on-demand streaming media from CBS, MTV, YouTube & Hulu (right now via a hack)
• Listen to streaming audio via the internet
• Browse photos from Flickr & Picasa

All of the media options are available using a local Optical Drive (CD/DVD), local hard drive, or across your local network via SAMBA!

A great Blog post with a fairly detailed write-up on installing Boxee on Ubuntu 8.10 can be found at the OpenSourcePenguin.net. This is a nicely detailed piece, that doesn't waste time on a lot of unnecessary fluff.

I'll be following up with another post regarding using a remote & how the rest comes along!