There was a fair amount of hacking done on it, nothing like the golden age of Xbox Media Center hacking, but soon it had a USENET client and a torrent downloader - in theory you could use it as a centralized repository for accumulating and watching media content, but I never really took it that far. It was basically a poor man's Mac Mini running Plex.
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It had gigabit ethernet, two USB ports, an internal hard drive, HDMI out, and could play pretty much any video file I threw at it, including 1080p content. Then the Popcorn Hour came out and I was impressed at its specs. I stuck with my Xbox as long as I could - honestly I didn't really need to upgrade because I watched movies on my trusty Infocus X1 projector, which wasn't really HD so there was no real benefit. Where did we go next? There were certainly many alternatives, HTPC's started entering the market, as well as Apple TV, or Mac Mini's running Plex, a fork of the original XBMC. Unfortunately, the hardware in the Xbox stayed the same and soon the software itself outgrew the technicals specs of the Xbox, you couldn't stream and decode the newer rips fast enough for it to keep up.
NFO files, the MP3 player could post to Audioscrobbler, it grew more and more mature as a software project. Soon all your movies had cover art screen scraped from IMDB, it recognized various naming strategies and split files, even extracted metadata from. I used my Xbox as a media player for years and years and watched as the software evolved. In many ways, the Xbox was a perfect candidate for a media player - it has S-Video output, it had a hard drive and a relatively fast graphics engine and CPU, it had ethernet (or even WiFi if you bought an addon) - it was a computer that didn't cost as much as a computer dedicated to playing media would cost.
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I think the original Xbox changed all this - shortly after hackers figured out how to modify the Xbox to play unsigned content, digital media enthusiasts started to collaborate and Xbox Media Player was born.
#Boxee box reviews movie#
There were hacky implementations on movie players on the Dreamcast which could barely decode the compressed video. As hardware started to catch up, you started to see DVD players with DIVX decoders built into them or took USB sticks that you could put movies on. In the beginning it was simple, you watched them on your computer, or if you managed to do it, you ran a cable from your computer to your TV. This is a problem I've thought about quite a bit.
When you have digital movie files, you're going to want a way to watch them. We had a VHS player and then a Laserdisc player and then a S-VHS player and then a DVD-player. Lately, I've been finding Bluray rips to replace my old DVD rips and in a way this is the format shift that my father had to do many times when I was growing up. Over the years, the encoding format of choice for movie files has shifted from DIVX to XVID to H.264. The movie files are in a variety of different formats spread across external hard drives, computers, and my 4-bay RAID 5 NAS (coincidentally, also a D-Link). I have hundred of DVDs and terabytes of movie files that I've collected over the years.
I watch a lot of movies and I'm the kind of person that actually does like to re-watch movies, so consequently I also collect a lot of movies. Some background before we go into initial impressions:
My Boxee Box arrived today and I've been playing with it since I got home.
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