My bro-in-law just bought a Vizeo TV with Netflix and Vudu (and Amazon video and Hulu). After playing with it for a few days, I can tell you that Netflix's selection of streaming movies is awful compared to Vudu's, especially if you want to watch anything recent. For a company that's talking big about abandoning the DVD's and becoming a streaming service, they better get their butts in gear and get some content deals (or if they've already got the deals, make more content available). Haven't used his free 5.99 on Vudu yet. Will have to see if I can get him to do it before I leave. I gotta say, it's really nice having all that built into the TV. It also will play local content via USB. Almost makes a Boxee superfluous (although the local content UI leaves a lot to be desired).

This is probably the main reason I'll be renting more movies for home. Oddly, being close to Hollywood means I have access to worse movie theaters then when I was in Austin. Higher prices to get into a theater, with a noticeable reduction in quality over what I had.

If someone was using their cell phone like that at an Alamo Drafthouse, they would have been escorted out the second time. The kids wouldn't have been there in the first place unless it was a below 21 showing or they came with parents. And same situation with them being kicked out if they were caught talking. I really hope the concept of food and a movie takes off nationwide, because with waitstaff in the room, problems are solved real quick.

Generally now if I do attend a regular theater, I'm more vocal towards people ruining the experience. I stood up and asked the person behind me to stop kicking my seat during Avatar last year in Colorado. They sheepishly looked at me, didn't say a word, and never touched the seat again. After having nearly 5 years of excellent theater experiences, my tolerance for disruptions is much lower then it used to be.

Big complaints: lack of consistency, fonts sized for use on monitor not TV, cheap taiwan-style file browser elements that look like they were lifted from a generic $50 media streamer. I also really hate photos used to show what menu item you have selected (for instance the giant picture of the living room and TV)

SageTV copied the UI for version 7, except with very bad font choices, crappy photos and poorly drawn graphic elements. Needless to say, I'm still using the UI from version 6.

No one gets it 100% right, but the parts Boxee got right, IMO, work a lot better than most others.

I do still wish that more people would learn from TiVo's really simple left and right (in and out / forward and back) method of entering and exiting menus. All this having to press a menu key which actually means "back" (copying Apple's lame iPod UI) is really annoying (Boxee does this).

Well there's your problem. I think it's a general consensus among film geeks that the Alamo Drafthouse is one of the best theaters in the world. It's hard to top that

I'm talking about a multiplex in one of the largest and most popular malls in America. It also, unfortunately, happens to be the best theater in the immediate area (though for some odd reason it seems to decline every month).


Perhaps it's because I know what the selection USED to be like, but it's not that bad these days for non-new releases.

But it also means you have access to some of the best, too, if you meet the right people. Make friends with a member of the DGA. (And, as a bonus, if you're going to a screening at the DGA, there's an amazing pancake restaurant next door. The lines are long, but...)

If the looks are the only thing holding you back install a different theme or make a better one? It's open source. It can only get better if people that care help it to do so.

Also, it has a library mode. Why would you ever need to view raw files? I haven't seen a raw directory listing on it since I set the path for the library.

Every theme seems to be a variation on the base. Or at the very least it must be extremely difficult to do certain things as they all have a number of common denominators.

I'm really looking for a finished product. That's because I've already designed a better UI for a product I was working on and shelved. Not about to start up the same work on someone else's product without a strategy to monetize the work.

Boxee is also open source, and I'm not about to try tackling its bug fixes.



I wouldn't. Is this in reply to someone else?

Sorry, it was a reply to your next post.

MythTV used to be simple (Right-in, Left-out) like that too. Then they decided it was too intuitive or something, so they added more bling images and made the Left-out stop functioning in *half* of the places.. Doh!

I patched the source code in my copy of 0.23 here to restore sane navigation again -- works very very well, patched. That's what is holding me back from upgrading to 0.24: having to redo all of those patches again.

But it'll happen sooner than later now, I think, because an increasing number of downloads give jerky playback on 0.23, yet are smooth on the 0.24 trial I have on the HD-ID11 box. For now, I just let the TV play back the ones that MythTV 0.23 has trouble with. Handy, that feature.

Cheers

XBMC is now supported on Apple TV. I think that's cheaper than Boxee Box. Apparently it does full 720p/1080p hardware decoding, too. Is the box fast enough to have a responsive UI, though?

Apple TV's A4 SoC is not powerful enough for clean/perfect 1080p. XBMC may do some 1080p streams with hiccups, but it will more than likely completely choke on streams with higher bandwidth. The situation should change if the rumors of the new ATV revision (and A5 SoC) are true.

This turns out to have been Linux kernel related. The HD-ID11 is running 2.6.36, whereas the main box had 2.6.35. Updating the latter to 2.6.37 eliminated the jerky playback. Curious, that.

Cheers

Apparently a popular upgrade is to install a Broadcom CrystalHD decoder card (mini PCIe) to get smooth 1080p with minimal CPU usage.

I might get one for my netbook eventually.

An update on Boxee Box:

This weekend we watched two movies on vudu, both in HDX. My wife and I had a guest visiting for the weekend, and we wanted to do a movie marathon. We decided to just chill out at our place and see what movies were available.

We watched The Town and Despicable Me, both of which were good movies (the latter was better), and both of which looked incredible and sounded great. Yeah, it would have cost $12 (one was free), but I really do think it was worth it for the quality and convenience.

At some point I'm going to check out the quality of the SD video.

Apparently reading/participating in the Boxee forum gives your Box all sorts of problems, so stay away and hopefully everything will stay relatively stable with yours.

I have yet to update to the release version of SP3 as I haven't had much movie watching time lately.

It was on my list for my Samsung NC10 (which has room and pads for another mini-PCIe card, but no header), but then it was stolen

I think thats for the old Apple TV. The new one is all integrated into one tiny PCB.

Bummer. Digikey has the headers (CDN$2.68/each), but I'll have to wait until I accumulate enough stuff for a minimum order.

Cheers

I must mention here my thanks to Mark, whose comments much earlier in this thread about the Zotac Atom/Ion machine pushed me in the direction of finally setting up a dedicated video player pc. I recently upgraded my tv to a rather nice 42 inch Panasonic plasma screen (TX-42PG20B, in case anyone cares) and was looking for a good solution to playing the fileserver video through it. It's my first TV upgrade in 11 years, and I wanted it to work properly.

I ended up, after a lot of research, picking up a Foxconn nt330i box, which is even smaller than the Zotac unit, and cheaper at least in the UK, although admittedly doesn't have as much IO. It has more than enough for the role it's in though, and with the latest XBMC on it (which took about 15 minutes in total to install and configure), works really amazingly well. I'm quite impressed.

And to be honest, I quite like the mediastream UI I have seen much worse in commercial products, and at least it's internally consistent.

So, thanks for showing me the direction to go in, Mark.

pca

Say.. does XBMC attempt to handle [BBC] iPlayer at all?

Looks like a great XBMC box, Patrick!
It's first-gen Ion, rather than Ion2, but XBMC knows how to squeeze the most from it, so I imagine it looks and performs very well there!

I've gotta try XBMC here someday.

Here's some new software I just found out about today. Probably the most similar to something I was designing back in early 2005 in fact (in concept, not necessarily exact UI paradigm). In 2004 I knew that this product category had legs and would lead to some decent money. Alas...

http://www.moovida.com/

It works really well. Playing a Bluray rip, which is the largest file with the highest bit rate of anything I have here, at about 6GB per hour, full 1080P, it uses about 20% cpu. That seems to be spread evenly across both cores and both hyperthreads. So far I haven't found anything it won't play perfectly, although a friend of mine who got one having seen my one has found it has issues with some DVB-T streams he's recorded.

It seems to be an issue with the front end not correctly identifying the raw stream, as the underlying mplayer will handle it perfectly if manually started.

And yes, it works really well with iplayer. There is a plug-in for it which, after some struggling to get it to install properly due to some slightly broken scripts, does a very good job.

The thing is considerably faster than I would have expected, in fact. It would probably make a very nice desktop machine for someone who wasn't a power-user. The only problem I had was getting 5.1 surround working correctly. When it was fed up the HDMI cable and back out of the TV into the receiver via optical, the center channel disappeared. Connecting the optical out from the foxconn box directly to the receiver fixed it. I suspect it's more a problem with the TV than the PC, although it might be some odd HDMI incompatibility due to differences in supported standards.

pca

Only for Windows. Fail.

It'd be nice if it worked on a plain Linux system, but them's the breaks. I'm guessing they'd make that move if an OEM were interested in running the software on their box. As a retail product, Windows is the OS that makes the most sense for any significant ROI at this time.

Pretty likely. I know my own TV's manual warns that audio fed through it reappears as 2-ch stereo on the optical output. I prefer to just feed the optical out from the Atom/Ion2 straight into the 5.1 surround system. Probably less audio delay to compensate for that way, too.

Today I wasted several hours debugging why my MythTV playback was suddenly jerky again with several high-bitrate files.. only to narrow it down to a TV bug of some kind.

I discovered that I can restore smooth playback mid-stream again by turning off the TV's 120Hz mode and then turning it (120Hz) back on again.

Now I just need to write that down somewhere so I'll remember the recipe for next time it (jerky playback) happens.

Cheers

That's just plain ugly!

I was thinking more of OS X. I've been looking for something like that to run on my Mac. Wasn't too keen on boxee yet when I tried it earlier.

You can also try Plex, which, like Boxee, is based on XBMC but with yet a different UI.

While I use a Mac as my primary machine, and would only ever continue to buy them in the future, I don't think I could see myself dedicating one to duty as a media system connected to the TV.

It's super difficult to support multiple platforms out of the gate, but hopefully they've created it in such a way as to allow for porting later on. If they want OEM contracts they'd really have to.

I've tried Boxee on my Mac, but honestly, the only reason I keep or use any similar programs on the Mac anymore is strictly for testing purposes. MPlayer is what I use to quickly play back a single video on the desktop when needed.

With a box like the Zotac ZBOX Blu-ray Series ZBOXHD-ID34BR.

Is there still a use for something like the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder. Or does the ION handle what the decoder card would do?