D-Link Boxee Box Media Player

With broadband becoming more commonplace in households and faster Internet speeds getting more affordable, streaming services are on the rise. Smart TVs have already penetrated the market offering streaming video and audio services through apps. Newer HD media players also support apps with the WD TV Live Hub being a perfect example. The Boxee Box, another very popular media player in the West has finally made it to our shores thanks to D-Link who make the little device. It’s essentially a media player just like the WD TV Live Hub, but with one crucial difference, it runs Boxee’s interface, which is a free and open platform piece of software with very good developer support. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Design and Build
The unusual design of the Boxee Box will certainly grab your attention. At first, it looks as if it’s been damaged or broken, but don’t worry, that’s how it’s meant to look. This unique and quirky design is a hit or miss, either you’ll like it or you won’t. I, for one, quite like it and the compact size which will go well with your HDTV in the hall. The box has a matte finish throughout, except for the side with the logo, which lights up when powered on. The bottom area is covered by a green rubber lining for better grip. The power button is placed on the top and there’s an SD card slot on the right.

Unusual and quirky design

All the connectors are placed at the rear, along with the ventilation holes. The Boxee Box comes with two USB 2.0 ports that are capable of reading NTFS partitioned hard drives. Other ports include a LAN jack, HDMI, Optical audio-out and stereo-out. Wi-Fi ‘n’ comes built-in by default. D-Link bundles an HDMI cable as well in the box, which is nice. However, the best accessory has got to be the remote, which has standard navigation buttons on one side and a QWERTY keypad on the other. This makes typing URLs a lot easier when you want to surf the net. The navigation buttons have a good response and so does the keypad. The keys are rubber coated for better grip and durability.

Features
The Boxee Box is powered by an Intel Atom CE4110 SOC processor. This is from their line-up of embedded systems specifically designed for performing video decoding. That’s pretty much what powers the box and some memory for installing the apps. There’s no internal storage or provision for adding a hard drive.

Interface is simple and easy to navigate

The main appeal of the Boxee Box is the number of supported apps, which currently stands at 205. The apps cover all popular categories from Entertainment, Gaming, Music, Lifestyle to News, Radio, etc. Some popular apps include YouTube, TuneIn Radio, Vimeo, TED, Revision3, CollegeHumor, to name a few. Boot up time of the Boxee Box is quick and on first use you’ll have to create an account and sign in, which is simple enough. Boxee will also check if there are any updates available and will update it accordingly. The interface is very easy and straightforward, you use the D-pad to navigate and the centre button to enter a menu, while the ‘Options’ button is used to move one step back.

The ‘Friends’ menu lets you add other Boxee users, so you can see what they are currently watching. ‘Watch Later’ queues up all the shows that you mark as favorites or ‘watch later’, so for instance if you’re searching for a show and stumble upon other interesting videos that you’d want to watch, simply mark them and they get added in the queue. ‘Shows’ lets you access clips from YouTube videos and other video streaming sites, provided you’ve installed the app. However, you can’t view current shows like - The Big Bang Theory, Community, etc. as they will only work if you’re in the U.S., which is unfortunate. The TV shows will show up if you search for them, but you can’t watch entire episodes, only clips or snippets that are on YouTube or Vimeo.

Not exactly blockbusters, eh?

‘Movies’ lets you access free to air movies from MUBI, which mostly include foreign films (no major Hollywood films), most of which I never heard of. Unfortunately for us, Netflix is not available here, so there’s no chance of even renting movies if you wanted to. ‘Apps’ lets you browse the 200+ apps and install them on the Boxee Box. You can browse through categories or simply search for the one you want. Last but not least, we have the ‘Files’ tab that let you browse for media either from a local drive that’s connected or the network. The browser can be accessed at any time by simply hitting the ‘Options’ button. From here, you can surf the internet, search for a TV show/movie or access the settings.