Boxee Box confirmed to have Tegra 2, Boxee Beta now open to all
By Donald Melanson 
posted January 7th 2010 5:43PM
posted January 7th 2010 5:43PM
We had a hunch that it might be the case, and Boxee has now finally come out and confirmed that the Boxee Box is indeed powered by Tegra 2. What's more, while you can't get your hands on it just yet, everyone can now finally the Boxee Beta, which first became available to a select few exactly one month ago. Right now, that's available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu, and Boxee is promising to make a version for Apple TV available at some point. Hit up the link below and scroll down a bit to find the download link.
Release date and price?
@techlord I am fairly certain that if that was known... It would be in the article and announced. So for now $200 or under and sometime during Q1
@techlord How about the elephant in the room... will it stream Netflix or not? It's almost certainly not going to run Win7, so no Silverlight with the requisite DRM. The only other possibility is that they've worked a deal with Netflix to use whatever the Roku uses. Otherwise... huge fail. :(
Its AllSpark...
@questionexclamation
nice
No Hard drive. I wonder if you can attach via USB?
I can see this thing getting hacked every which way to Sunday...
@altarity: And THAT'S why I'm excited about it... pending the price, of course.
@altarity
"What’s not in the Box:
* No hard-drive – We discussed hard-drive at length with D-Link, and figured people already have storage solutions, and that we should do our best to reduce the price of the Boxee Box. You’ll be able to connect your choice of storage devices directly to the Box using USB
* No IR – While we realize many people are using universal remotes, we believe there is a greater benefit having a full QWERTY keyboard, and the right way to do that was RF. We really wanted to also support IR, for various reasons we could not get it as part of the build. We continue supporting this in software, so you can use any IR dongle and continue using your universal remote with Boxee."
@Toffer Peak So can you record to external USB storage? What about integrating with terrestrial HD tuners for broadcast TV channels?
@philgrad
I just got that straight from the Boxee blog. http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/01/07/boxee-box-internals-revealed-nvidia-tegra-2-ftw/
As far as I know Boxee only does Internet streaming and will not allow you to record these streams. The storage is just to play videos you already have.
@Toffer Peak
How bout bluetooth?
That would accommodate all sorts of peripherals.
I do like the lower price point. Good call.
@Toffer Peak
Wait, what? No IR? This just went to must own to, no buy really quick.
A keyboard for a home theater device? Are you guys nuts? I would just do a HTPC if I wanted to mess with a device with a keyboard. Seriously, wtf.
Blah. Next!
So, tegra2 does 1080p?
@normanrz I would imagine. Nvidia claimed twice the power of the Tegra 1, which handled 720p without a hitch.
@normanrz
Handily. It has 2 Cortex A9 processors Seperate video decode/encode cores, audio decode core, and a GForce GPU all on the same chip. Performance should be multiples of the SoC used in the iPhone 3gs. Oh yeah it runs upto 1GHZ.
@altarity very nice. then there's a chance tegra2 makes all ion nettops irrelevant as HTPCs
@normanrz
"With Tegra 2 powering the Boxee Box you can:
* Enjoy a fluid and responsive user interface that is similar to the UI performance up till now available only on full blown PCs
* Play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD video content from the Internet
* Play Adobe® Flash® 10.1 content from across the web, including HD content"
I am Boxxy, you see?!
@maddawg579
My Queen!
Here that 4chan.
Maybe not, I think I'm still banned!
i noticed the app for hulu was missing off the beta... tried bring it up in the boxee browser but cant get the home screen. Not liking this but I also could not know what I am doing.
@joshuahhh You are right, there is no longer an App for Hulu. Instead it is built into the media library. If you search for a TV show (Like LOST for example), in the tv show library you will find that season 1-5 are on netflix. And (atleast) seasons 3-5 are on Hulu as well as ABC.com.
When you select a show, it will bring you to the seasons/episodes menu. Simply select an episode and it will tell you the multiple sources it has for that video.
@Kohlins I'll have to give that a try. One thing I do enjoy about hulu though is scrolling through all the shows and seeing things I had forgotten about and etc.. though the search does sound awesome.
@joshuahhh Well you don't have to search I guess, haha. On the left side of any of the media libraries(tv shows/movies), you can select to look at your MEDIA/Favorite media or Browse everything that is available from any of the sites/sources Boxee supports.
@joshuahhh Another thing I like about Hulu (and Hulu desktop) is ordering my queued videos by expiration order so I can watch them before they disappear. I don't see a way of doing that in Boxee so far...
"everyone can now finally the Boxee Beta"
Looks like you accidentally a word.
"everyone can now finally the Boxee Beta"?
Well sir, I'll have you know, I accidentally the whole thing.
GAH!! you beat me..
I'm not seeing the link to the beta, am I blind? Where is it?
I guess you can dl it strait from their website, however it didn't mention it was now the beta until I actually started the install process.
@bigmike7801 They go by version numbers 9.20.xxxx I believe is the Beta.
@Kohlins It is the beta. I just got done installing it and playing around with it a bit. It does seem more user friendly but some of the applications seem a bit slower to load. That might just be a problem with my wifi though.
I'm very surprised they went with ARM. Here's hoping the code makes it way back to XBMC and then onto lots of other platforms (Windows Mobile, Android, etc)
@EGOvoruhk An Arm port of XBMC is already in development and working though its not in any shape for end users, still a lot of optimization to be done.
My AppleTV just got put on Ebay. Goodbye ass****
i downloaded the beta but it keeps crashing on launch on my mac pro 10.5.8
Love boxee, I was in the beta and it really has become one of the best media center applications out there. The boxee box on the other hand is amazing I cannot wait to buy one just for the remote alone.
@bantam usually "on the other hand" means the other thing is the opposite of what you were talking about in the first place (as in bad or good)
While Boxxe is the best software out there for content aggregation and media playing, from using the Beta, there are still several issues that keep me from using it as my player of choice.
So what is the advantage of this box vs a pc or mac using software such as "Playon" which already streams internet content such as Hulu, Netflix etc.. to my TV via my PS3?
Looks like a cool little pc. Love the remote with keyboard. I wish I had a use for it so I could justify buying it :(
"everyone can now finally the Boxee Beta,"
These kinds of errors (ie, missing words) are going to be the one factor that drives me to stop reading engadget altogether. They've become chronic on the site, and are completely unnecessary, and avoidable - if the posters just took a moment to read over their posts...
Come on guys, you can do better than this!
Anyone else having issues with with the beta+mac mini+apple remote combination? My remote seems to work fine with frontrow but boxee doesn't react to it at all, except when I press the menu button for an extented period...