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Old 2010-12-07, 04:01 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: San Diego / San Francisco, CA
Re: Standalone FLAC player to connect to HiFi

Quote:
Originally Posted by saltman View Post
I like the way it looks.

Others are saying it works really well on everything. Please post your thoughts after you've used it for a while for others here. I've also considered picking one up.
I've had Boxee Box for a couple of weeks now and will give some of my impressions. First, I think the Boxee Box is currently targeted towards video, and more specifically, online streaming of video. Evidently, they changed the user interface on the Boxee Box version as compared to the PC version of Boxee, which was more local content focused. There have been a lot of complaints in the forums and so they are going to release a revision to the UI to give you the option to focus the UI on online vs. local content.

Things that Boxee Box does fairly well:

1. Play online TV shows from various networks that provide streams of their shows.
2. Play online TV shows that are 'net shows, like Revision3 content.
3. Revo App
4. Youtube App - but you can't log into your youtube account and watch your favorited videos or subscribed channels.
5. Pandora

I haven't explored streaming local video content yet so I won't comment on that.

With regard to streaming local audio, I don't think I could recommend this as a great device yet.

The good:

1. Plays FLAC gaplessly between gapless tracks.

The bad:

1. The player is the most basic player you can imagine. There is no fast forward, no rewind. When an album is done playing, it stops. You can't queue up multiple albums.
2. You can't play random from your whole music collection.
3. You can't make a playlist in Boxee Box, although evidently you can make a playlist on your PC then point your Boxee Box to that file but that's stupid.
4. Album covers are scraped off the internet rather than using a folder.jpg. This is bad for a couple of reasons - 1) Many of the album covers are wrong or look terrible, 2) It looks them up every time so you have to wait for the album covers to scrape (this takes several seconds if you have a lot of albums for an artist).
5. Once you have navigated away from the play screen, you lose the ability to skip a track. That is, you have to go back to the album screen and select the track you want (unless you want it to go to the next track rather than skipping a track).
6. You organize only by tags. I think this will be a problem for most of these players, not just Boxee Box. The issue there is that it makes it hard when you have a lot of live music for an artist. So you would need to name the artist "Live Artist" for example, unless you wanted to go into that artist and there would be 300 live shows in front of your official releases. In some ways I think a directory structure organization would be better.
7. The visualization during music playing sucks! It looks like Windows 95 graphics. PS3's visualizations are awesome in comparison.

Well, that's it for now, I'll post more if I think of more. Supposedly audio is pretty low on the Boxee Box team's priority but they plan to make it better in the future.
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