No thanks. If you're both going to the effort of discussing this stuff, you may as well make the discussion available for others to read -- contributing to the communal knowledge base and all of that.

Most of us can ignore it all if we're not interested.

Ditto.
You've helped me defer purchasing one for now.

Matt, have I ever sent you one of the IR receivers I sell? It's supposed to work with the Boxee Box, but I haven't had the chance yet to test with the release firmware - I'm in the middle of a bit of renovation and can't set up the video switcher right now.

What Phoenix42 said. Whilst I may not have a D-Link Boxee box, it is good to know that its not quite 100% yet and needs some more work.

Okay, thanks guys, I just wanted to make sure. And it's not 100% to say the least, but the large batch of improvements and bug fixes only 25 days after release gives me some confidence in the product.

Bruno, I do have one of your receivers, but I'm not certain where it is at the moment. I'll have to go digging for it because I'd like to try that out. I don't mind using the Boxee remote because of the keyboard, but it might be nice to program some controls into my Pronto. Any idea what codes I'd use, though?

Also, I was able to find the discussions about the .tbn format, but have one question: how do I make them? Do I just get a .jpg and change the extension? Is it a different format entirely? I gather that the .tbn comes from hacking the original XBox to show different thumbnails, and probably carried through XBMC to Boxee, but I wish they'd just let you save jpegs. It would be much simpler to just have a "folder.jpg" file and, say, a "movie title.jpg" file for each movie. I'm not sure why .tbn is necessary. And given how hard it is to search for a tool that makes these files (I keep getting Trinity Broadcasting Network), it's a difficult thing to figure out...

The thread I saw just mentioned renaming a jpeg to .tbn - it was for use when you had multiple movies within the same folder. If you keep your movies in their own folder (I do this) then the folder.jpg should be all you need.

I'm going to check my email for your address and I'll send you another receiver - this one is from a newer batch and has PCB/component differences. I can't remember when I sent you the one you have now so I can't recall if it's a "2005" or a Vista/7 class model.

The Box should recognize "MCE2" codes - that's what Boxee calls them. They should be Vista/7 class MCE codes which I'm not actually certain differ from the 2005 and previous codes. I do know it's the same codes the XBOX apparently responds to. There are actually multiple code IDs for MCE, but I don't think there's a way to tell Boxee which ID to listen to, nor how to tell XBOX the same thing. So for people with multiple devices it may be problematic without the use of an IR repeater and blaster system, plus hiding the receivers so they don't themselves pick up the IR from a remote directly. Hopefully Boxee will create their own codes - something I want to talk to them about.

BTW, have you been emailing Avner at the general email address or his own personal address? I should write to him directly about this.

I can't seem to find your address in email, and you may have moved since then anyway, so send me your current mailing address. You can email me by using my first name at my company domain.

Ah, so does the .tbn only provide an image for the whole folder, and not each individual file? I really wish they'd let us override the image they download...

?? Nonono. What I've read in the forum indicated that moviename.tbn will override the cover art for the movie when it's stored next to other movies. folder.jpg will do it for the movie only when that movie is the only one within that folder. At least that's what was written by the people in the thread I saw.

Ah, I see.

Update: as much good faith that the update gave me, they lost right back again. My favorite element of the update was that subtitles would be off by default now. I mean, I was baffled as to why they would be on by default originally, but at least they fixed it...

...except nothing is different. After applying the update, I went and played a video and was presented with subtitles. I could turn them off for that video while it was playing just like I had to do for each video before. I thought "okay, maybe there's a master setting that just received the wrong toggle when they made the fix." So I went to settings, and there's an option under "subtitles" that says something like "enable subtitles by default" and it was unchecked. This is where I started getting discouraged. I changed nothing and went to play several movie files. All that had subtitles showed them to me, and when I went into the video setting (the one you reach while the video was playing), there was a check mark next to "show subtitles" or whatever it's called.

So I went back to the master setting and tried toggling it to the other setting, the one that should give me the opposite of what I want. Well, I got the exact same result. The setting appears to not do anything at all! I tried flipping it two more times and it never did anything.

Like I said, this is discouraging. I so want to believe that they're listening and making corrections, but it just really doesn't look like they're doing things well here...

Hmm... Is it because it is you already imported video and therefore it has already picked up that subtitles setting from when it was enabled by default?

It's possible, but that would still be a really stupid way of doing things. I think most users would assume that the setting is a playback issue, not something that gets applied to each video.

Also, it's not something you can turn on or off for each video independently. Before the update, if I played a video, turned off the subtitles, stopped the video, then played it again, selecting to start from the beginning (a sort of reset), I would have to turn the subtitles off again. I still have to do this after the update. The device seems to want to force the subtitles on me!

Well, Trevor, it appears you were correct. It seems ridiculous that it was a per-video setting, especially since it was a setting that wouldn't stick, but from what other people were saying on the forums, if you had played a video with subtitles before the update, it would still show the subtitles after the update.

To simplify everything, I just removed the folder and added it again. Now it works as it should.

That's ridiculous. Unfortunately all the media code is based on XBMC and the UI design was farmed out to a design firm. Could be why a lot of what's in there now seems tacked on. This is still fixable, but I haven't seen indication yet to show me where they're going with it. I have plenty of ideas myself on how to remedy the situation for pretty much all user camps.

Eww. It sounds like its designed by programmers for other programmers to use. The way they've done it is admittedly more flexible but not actually what you need or want for nearly all cases. It would have been okay if they hadn't made the mistake of forcing that setting on originally and also compounded it by somehow screwing up the DB which prevented you from toggling the setting afterwards.

Don't get me wrong, they do get a lot right, but it's the attention to detail they really miss out on. A lot of little things, that when compounded start to weight very heavy.

As both Matt and I have mentioned before, it's still the best thing out there, but it's a shame it just doesn't hit that last 10% of fit and finish.

I agree with that statement 100%.

I'd add that they at least seem to be addressing the bugs and complaints they receive, so it seems they're improving.

It's not clear to me (without rereading zillions of posts here) how this actually works. But the way I want it to work, is to have the subtitles on/off setting remembered on a per-video (file) basis.

When I watch a great Italian film, I want the subtitles every time I play it. But not so for English or (most) French videos. The ideal interface would remember my viewing preference per-video.

Cheers

I wouldn't mind that, but the difference here was that previously there was no setting, the player just decided to have subtitles on by default for every video. Once you started playing a video, you could go into the menu that lets you choose between the various audio tracks and things like that, and turn the subtitles off. After that, you could leave the video and do other things. When you came back to the video, it gave you a choice to resume from where you left off, or restart it. Resuming saved everything about the video from before, such as the audio track selected and your subtitle preference. Restarting started the video fresh from the defaults, which used to be subtitles enabled. This is what was annoying. I don't ever need to watch my backup of Shawshank Redemption with subtitles.

After the update, however, the default in the settings was to have subtitles disabled by default (what I wanted), but any video that I had watched at any point before the update appeared to have the subtitles enabled by default, whether I was resuming them or starting from the beginning.

Naturally, this will no longer be a problem for anyone who buys the Box today, but I worry that it shows something about the company. Did they not try this out themselves? Were they testing on fresh boxes with no video carrying over?

The solution was very simple: just remove the directory from the file sources and re-add it.


Bruno, thanks for the tip about the .tbn files. It really was as easy as saving a jpg of the cover art and renaming the extension to .tbn. Now I have far better cover art for some of the movies.

I really don't know how it goes about choosing the art for some of this stuff. Take, for example, Highlander. The cover art it chose is below.

I ran a Google image search for "Highlander," and scrolled through at least five pages and couldn't find it. I had to narrow the search to black and white images. That art doesn't appear on IMDb, and it doesn't exactly show up on Amazon (there's an angled view of it). I don't know what made their algorithm choose that image over the dozens of others I ran across...

That seems to be common mindset across many software vendors. The response I've gotten when I had a chance to ask, was sort of, a would you rather us fix the trivial problems or create new functionality.

My translation- "Hunting down and fixing "trivial" bugs is boring and frustrating, writing new stuff is fun and exciting."

I'd rather you not write functionality you don't intend to function properly. So yeah, fix the "trivial" problems.

Now if it's between "major" and "trivial" problems, then fix the "major" ones first. Bug hopefully, your "trivial" problems are trivial to fix. If they aren't, start designing better software, and for goodness sake, don't create new functionality when you can't even fix the old stuff.

Some companies just don't have the capital to sit on their product with no sales while they spend the 50% of the time that it takes to do that last 10% of fit and finish, even if they want to. Sometimes it's just simple economics that dictate that they release early and often as they get things fixed/polished so they can have a revenue stream.

But then as Jeff said, stop adding new features and focus on your core functionality.

Boxee has been free and available (out) for a few years though. And for the release of the "Box" they changed their complete UI. They don't exactly fit the typical model.

I believe software is organic and it's never truly finished, however, there needs to be a certain amount of content and sense of completeness to a version 1.0 - with the last minute changes Boxee really threw out the baby with the bathwater as they say.

And for me, with a product featuring a UI that used to be very focused on media/library presentation, not filtering articles is a pretty big omission. That would be one of the first things I'd have up and running simply as part of doing a basic alphabetic sort.

I know all about this- as right now we are about to ship a product that is FAR short on the functionality we were supposed to deliver (un-realistic expectations, I'm afraid). However, what's in there works, and if there are bugs (I'm certain there will be) we will fix them and they will not be difficult to fix.

Having that 10% hanging out there in front of the customer can destroy the credibility the 90% that works correctly has earned. Every time we develop a feature, we make sure all known outstanding bugs are fixed before considering it "done". I think this is important, because in my experience that last 10% often ends up being the last 90%, but you don't know it until you try to make it work. I can't count the number of times I've heard "I've just got one more thing and I'm done with this"- and then I keep hearing about problems encountered for the next two week.

Ok, I'm just starting to use Boxee, but how do you tag a video when Boxee can't find it in IMDB? My 22 mo. old daughter likes to watch Dora the Explorer, but the videos don't come up in IMDB. I've got them all tagged properly in iTunes, but that seems to make no difference at all. They all just show up in Boxee as "missing identity"

Officially: That's one of the problems Matt and I have discussed - you don't. With the current UI/functionality they will always be unidentified and you'll need to browse files to see/reach them.

Unofficially: If you're using Boxee on a computer system, you can use a third-party program to manipulate Boxee's DB and create or modify entries. There should be numerous discussions in the Boxee forums about a few ways to do this.

Ok...so if I name them in the "proper" format, they go into the library. Unfortunately, as soon as I change some data in iTunes, it then renames them and they're gone from Boxee again. I know I don't have to let iTunes manage my folders, but I would like to for some strange unknown reason.

Interesting. How does iTunes name them? Back when I first tried Boxee on my Windows machine, I thought I was having trouble getting the file name right, but actually Boxee has been surprisingly lenient on naming methodology lately. For the most part for TV shows as long as the name of the show is in the file and the episode number (in several different formats), it understands. For movies, as long as there are no duplicate titles it'll get the correct data with just the name of the movie.

That's actually one area I don't have any complaints about

Oh, did I mention yet that requiring a username (registration in general) to use Boxee is infuriating? And when using the Box (for the first time) it's just a painful exercise in frustration. Though switching users is also a bit of a PITA. Too bad, because if you have a kid in the house it would be nice to be able to have a different local library defined for them.

The biggest PITA is that you can't use whatever name you want either. I mean, it's my box. Why does Boxee have to check with the server to see if anyone else is using the name I want to use? They already have your email address as the primary differentiating piece of information. Why can't there by two "Smiths?" When implementing a community, don't key off the user name.

So now for my own private box I have to have a user name with a number in it. So if I want to have multiple user names for people in the house, instead of having "Bruno" and "Erin" and "Olivia" I have to have something like "Bruno8736" "Erin47343" and "Olivia3221" - shortsighted.

There's a firmware update due next week (that's two in less than a month, which I like).

It looks like the primary focus of this update is, thankfully, on local media issues. To start, you get an option to tell the Box what you use it for. I don't know if this is the best way to do this (it adds yet another option to the setup, for one thing), but it's better. It'll be much faster to get to the areas I want.

Also included is the ability to sort videos, jumping through movies by alphabet, marking as (un)watched, and an option for hourly source scanning.

Unfortunately you have to log into the forums to see the images, but they don't add a whole lot of information.

I'm looking forward to this, primarily because it will greatly reduce the button presses on my remote to get to my local media. The fact that they've implemented fixes requested by their users in under a month impresses me.

Are they caching the cover art in this release? That's probably oddest thing missing from 1.0 (which was in the betas) since it doesn't involve the UI.

I just took a look at the link you posted and I'm a little disappointed to still see a "files" entry under the Movies main entry. Unless of course that screen shot is while running in the current "online preferred" mode. One would hope that if you set Local as the preference, the options at the left side (beginning) of the sub-menu would be local playback related and wouldn't use the word "files". I wouldn't mind, and wold actually prefer, if the online/internet stuff were more clearly labeled instead.

Anyway, happy to have the changes, but it's still very obvious that this UI was quickly put together and now they're scrambling to make it work to address customer complaints. Could be a bumpy road ahead with a lot of beta firmware drops.