The Boxee Box Review

Music & Photos

Boxee’s Files hub also enables music and photo streaming from networked and attached storage.

The Box does a great job finding music and displaying album art, but that’s pretty much the extent of what Boxee can do with your MP3s. There’s no quick way to search for songs and no playlist support from what I can tell. You can just view your music collection by album or by artist.

The photos browser includes all folders with any photos in them, so you need to be careful to keep your photos segregated from things like apps. Despite Boxee’s intelligence, it does help to create individual shares based on the type of content you have (e.g. a share for pictures, a share for music, a share for movies, etc...).

Although RAW files appear in the file browser, I couldn’t get the Boxee Box to load any .NEF files taken with my Nikon D700. Performance is also a problem. Some thumbnails appear quickly while others can take a very long time to show up.

By default there’s a ridiculous amount of Ken Burns effect applied to any slideshow (you can disable it in the settings menu), and viewing photos in any directory becomes a slideshow by default. The play/pause button on the remote comes in handy.

You zoom and rotate photos using onscreen controls. The zoom function desperately needs some sort of multitouch interface, while rotate is pretty quick.

The integrated SD/MMC card reader is a great way to display photos on your TV. It’s a nice addition to the Box.

Apps

Like almost everything these days, the Boxee Box supports apps. For the most part these aren’t apps like you’d find on your smartphone, but rather collections of video content from the web. A surprising number of companies/websites have Boxee apps. There’s YouTube Leanback, revision3, TED, Flickr, Wired, cnet TV, Fail Blog, and Reddit TV among others.

You can favorite apps as well so you don’t have to scroll through the list of 100+ Boxee apps to find what you’re looking for. The apps hub is also how you get get direct access to the Boxee Browser.

There’s tons of really good free video content online and Boxee apps are a great way to get access to it. I was actually surprised by how big the Boxee app ecosystem already was.

Turn off adult mode in the settings menu and you’ll even get some porn apps, just in case you wanted a quick way to get your favorite internet porn onto your TV.

Boxee does support background operation of apps. The Pandora app keeps running (and playing music) even after you back out of the app. The Boxee menu gains a play/pause button and tell you the name of the track you’re currently listening to. Selecting the Pandora widget brings up more playback controls and a visualization. As soon as you start playing any content that has audio however Pandora pauses automatically.

The Pandora app itself is just like what you get by visiting the webpage. You give it your login information and you get full access to all of your stations. You can like/dislike songs, skip forward and even create new stations.