The Boxee Box Review

Settings

Since Boxee started from within the enthusiast community, it is one of the more configurable commercial media streamers available today. To access Boxee settings you have to select the gear widget from the menu dropdown in the upper left corner.

Boxee Box settings are divided into seven categories: General, Social, Media, System, Network, File Sources and Adult. What you can do within each is listed below.

General

The general settings page had options for setting the current time and location. Boxee will give you a little icon telling you today’s weather based on your location. This is where you set display options as well. The Boxee Box can output 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Common to both Boxee and XBMC is the ability to match screen refresh rate to the refresh rate of your video, which you can toggle here as well.

Users with cinemascope projector setups will rejoice as Boxee supports 2.35:1 aspect ratios as well as 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10.

If you need to tweak overscan you can do that here as well. There are two routes of adjusting overscan, either manually stretching a reference image until it fills the screen or by percentage (3 - 6%). On my 42-inch Westinghouse 1080p display the 6% setting worked perfectly.

Boxee also ships a handful of test patterns as well as the ability to check for dead/stuck pixels on your display by displaying solid color patterns on your screen (red, green, blue, white and black).

General settings include screen and power saver options, both of which can be set for a configurable period of time. You can even choose to have Boxee throw up a black screen or just dim the screen when idle.

Boxee offers a healthy list of language and character set options:

And finally you can choose to turn navigation sounds on/off (although you can’t replace them with your own), as well as choose to display hidden files/folders (disabled by default).

Social

The Social settings page only tells you that you can display videos from buzz, Facebook and Twitter streams. You can’t actually enable any of those here, you have to visit boxee.tv to do that.

Media

Here you can set the size, style, color and character set of subtitle text. You can disable the Ken Burns effect for photos in a slideshow as well as change the transition time and image display time.

There isn’t much customization for music playback, just enable/disable automatic playback of the next song in a folder.

A nice feature Boxee includes is to not resolve videos under a configurable size. It prevents Boxee from indexing videos that are clearly smaller than a full length movie or episode of a TV show (e.g. that video your mom sent you of a cat licking another cat).

System

One of the coolest settings Boxee enables is the ability to display a debug information overlay on your screen. You can control the level of detail you get (e.g. only displaying fatal errors) but you do get the option to display information like CPU utilization, memory usage and current frame rate. This is awesome. All platforms should allow this level of detail as an option.

Also from the system settings screen you can select what forms of audio output your receiver supports and choose between HDMI, optical and stereo outputs for sound.

Networking

Boxee offers all necessary networking options and a few that are specific to the Box. Here you can enable/disable the integrated webserver, which is used for the iPhone remote. You can also enable windows file sharing on the Box which gives you network access to the ~300MB of free space on the device.

Boxee also serves a webpage (http://boxeeip:8080) that contains error logs useful in debugging those oh-so-annoying crashes I mentioned earlier. The webpage also tells you how hot the CE4100 SoC is and how quickly the fan is spinning (which appears to always be set to a near-silent 50%).

File Sources

The File Sources settings lets you add/remove local and network shares that Boxee is monitoring for content. From here you can also change the frequency of scanning for any source.

Adult Content

Unlike Cable TV, you don’t exactly have to pay extra for adult content on the web and thus Boxee offers the ability to enable viewing of adult themed feeds and apps on the Box. By default it’s disabled and you do have the ability to set a password lock on the option if you don’t want just anyone to pop into the settings menus and enable it.