Adding a Boxee Box to your TV Stand
I’ve been collecting a lot of digital media – mostly videos, of which I store on my external hard drive to enjoy later from my Macbook. I’d use my Macbook to Rip DVD’s or Download/Stream content, and whilst this is good it would be better if I made use of my 40” Samsung HDTV that I have sitting on my TV stand. I had two options: I could have bought a Mini-DVI cable to use my HDTV as an external monitor, or I could get a dedicated HTPC (Home Theatre PC) using Boxee as a frontend. Naturally I chose the latter as it would be more fun. The Acer Aspire Revo appealed to me due to it’s form factor, plus its hardware accelerated graphics via the NVIDIA ION platform.
The first thing I did after I set up the Aspire Revo was check out the stock Operating System. The Revo uses the Splashtop flavour of Linux, which boots up to the main menu in a little over 10 seconds. Whilst this is pretty impressive the default OS is barely customizable beyond what is already provided (Firefox for web browsing and a VoIP client for Skype), so that means no Boxee on this installation. I had to install another OS.
I chose to install Ubuntu 9.04 on this system due to the fact I was already familiar and fairly comfortable with this Linux distribution. As the Aspire Revo has no CD/DVD drive, I decided to install Ubuntu from a bootable USB pen drive. This can apparently be temperamental depending on the USB drive; apparently more so when attempting to create a bootable drive from Mac OS X, as I found out. There is a guide to “create a USB bootable drive from Mac OS X, although this did not seem to work for me. The drive was not reading as bootable using this method, so instead I used the Win32DiskImager” from a Windows Installation, which finally got me a bootable drive (Obviously replace Ubuntu NBR for a distro of your choice, the principle still stands.)
After installing Ubuntu 9.04 on the Revo, I had to configure the drivers. Thankfully Liam Green Hughes’ guide for setting up the graphics and sound drivers was exactly what I needed. My software was all set up and fully operational. I initially chose to use the Boxee Remote app on my iPhone to control the Boxee box, but after some use I found it to be a massive drain on the battery. I instead opted to use the Playstation 3’s bluetooth remote. I used popey’s guide to set up the PS3 remote with Ubuntu.
So after setting having the system now set up how I would like it, I would say I am quite impressed with what I have got. The Aspire Revo is a very capable system that can handle most formats I can throw at it easily. As far as high definition content goes, I have only tested with compressed MKV files; not of any lossless formats. I am not one to download or rip Blu-Ray images, but I’m sure it will handle those formats somewhat satisfactorily. At the moment, the biggest problem format-wise is with Adobe Flash. Some Flash videos can be quite laggy and choppy, especially with high-def content. Adobe are to release an update which will apparently solve this problem.
As with Boxee itself, despite it being just an alpha it sports quite enough features to already for mainstream adoption. Its interface is great, clearly deviding content into Apps, Videos and Music. Boxee will attempt to automatically recognize content to add to its library, though the recognition system at this stage is quite primitive – only reading from the file name and not the contents meta tags. I also had problem trying to get Boxee to recognise content from my USB hard drive at all. However, this is a known problem that should be fixed by the beta. For an alpha release this product is quite clean, and not riddled with as much bugs as you will expect; only a few little annoyances here and there that are sure to be ironed out with upcoming updates. Boxee is looking very promising and I am definitely looking forward to following its development, especially in the terms of the social-networking aspect of the product. Hopefully content providers will see the potential power of this new product and jump aboard sooner rather than later. Official support from services like BBC iPlayer or 4oD would be brilliant.