D-Link Boxee Box - Box Office Hit Or Flop?
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Performance
Performance Matters
Apps
There are many pre-installed apps on the Boxee as mentioned, and we attempted three to see how they'd measure up. The YouTube application, in our opinion, is rather sparse based on its solitary search option with little else. For example, there are no trending categories to choose from. What's more, its random playback tendencies didn't win our vote either. Next, we checked VEVO out, and were surprised some of the music videos managed to stream through since their services are technically only available in the States and Canada. However, note that not all clips were playable, such as Britney Spears' which returned a blank screen to gawk at. We had better luck with Katy Perry's "Firework" title though. We also gave the Accuweather widget a shot, credit to the crazy weather we've been experiencing lately. This app, however, worked like a charm with detailed weather and wind conditions depicted over the next three days, as well as the option to call up a weather map.
Video Streaming
We tried streaming a number of short clips from OpenFilm, an online video portal for indie filmmakers. If you'd like the good news first, you might want to know that streaming is relatively smooth on our office's LAN connection with hardly any stutters or caching issues. Video and audio playback were comfortably in sync as well. As for the bad news, there was hardly a "movie" title we recognized from OpenFilm's library, though we can probably blame our non-artistic souls for that matter. One other observation is most of them were in SD resolution or less, and the Boxee wouldn't automatically scale the streamed content to fill your screen. To do so, you'll need to adjust the player's Video settings to suit your TV's native aspect ratio. Lastly, while most media players are able to display video properties such as format, CODEC and resolution, there is no such feature to be found on the Boxee. Clicking on the "Info" icon would only reveal the film's running time and brief synopsis. As you can see, the Boxee is really targeted at the mass market users rather than the tech heads.
Media Playback
Since we could not tell if the streamed content was encoded in any particular container or CODEC, here's our chance to put the Atom-based player to the test with our own video files which we're more familiar with. First up, we aimed a couple of HD (720p) files of varying bitrates and formats such as WMV, MOV and MKV at the Boxee. It rendered them well without any obvious stutters, with the exception of the RMVB extension. The Boxee also survived videos containing the Xvid and DivX CODECs without signs of syncing issues for SRT or SUB subtitle formats.
Next, we went full-monty with two MP4 and M2TS clips (1080p), encoded using the popular H.264 AVC CODEC. And we are happy to report that the Boxee coped with them easily, all, but with one caveat - the player required a second or two to resume playback after fast forwarding or rewinding tracks. Basically, the bigger the file, the longer it takes for the player to recover. On another note, while our tests were conducted over USB with an external Flash drive, we also noted that the Boxee was able to read multimedia files over the LAN network using various protocols such as TCP, DLNA, and SMB such as Samba.
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