Product Listing

D-Link Boxee Box - Box Office Hit Or Flop?

By Andy Sim - 4 May 2011
Launch SRP: S$329

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. 

That's the default YouTube page you are looking at. Apart from its spartan layout, what's also interesting is that we could not locate an "Escape" key on the remote or on its QWERTY keypad.

We preferred VEVO's interface over YouTube's. Getting the VEVO clips to play, on the other hand, is very much like playing Russian roulette since not all of them are playable on the Boxee.

Accuweather's widget is one of the better implemented apps amongst the lot with its simple yet informative spread. You'll need to configure your current location, Singapore in our case, for the app to pull out the relevant weather report.

Boxee's browser could cope with embedded FLV content, although it had intermittent issues with Flash-based animation such as the advertiser's banner which failed to load at the top portion of our site. Managing the browser's pointer using the D-pad can be a trying experience as well.

 

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.

OpenFilm's mix of quirky indie films isn't exactly Hollywood material. As a bonus, we did not encounter any streaming issues when selecting various films at random, such as the French noir film "Magic Kisa". 

A screenshot of "Magic Kisa" scaled to suit our 1080p 16:9 HDTV. Notice how the aspect is slightly skewed as well, especially on the horizontal plane. Conversely, we did not experience any issues with playback if we allow the file to buffer up first.

 

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.

The "Files" sub-menu enables you to select and play photos, music or movie files from different platforms. For example, either from a network drive or locally connected external storage. A random screen-cap is used for the file's thumbnail as shown.

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.

Finally, the Boxee's true potential was unleashed with a 1080p test file bearing the mark of H.264 AVC on an MPEG4 format. Although its picture quality was able to match up to other media players we've assessed, the Intel CE4110-based player required a moment or two to resume playback after fast forwarding the track.

This is the guilty CODEC which purportedly caused D-Link to favor Intel's Atom solution over NVIDIA's Tegra 2. Shown here is a 1080p H.264 AVC clip on the M2TS format. By the way, this video caused quite a stir when it was first unveiled years ago for it was shot on the Canon 5D Mark II to showcase its Full-HD capabilities. 

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8.0
  • Design 9
  • Performance 8
  • Features 9
  • Value 7.5
The Good
Chic Design
Wide Range of Apps
Healthy Video Support
The Bad
Awkward Browser
Subpar VOD Content
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