Review: DLink Boxee Box

Every day, 3.2 gajigabytes of streaming video are delivered straight to the screens of slackers like you and me, sitting at our desks at work and gawping at classic outtakes from The Muppet Show in 1979, re-creations of news events by creative Taiwanese animators, and adorably cute animal babies.

Why don't we just take all that entertainment home and splash it up on our HDTV screens?

That's the idea behind Boxee, which organizes web video for you, makes it easier to share with other people, and simplifies the browsing interface, so it's better suited for when you're sitting on the couch.

Boxee has existed as software for over a year now, and now it's available as a $200 gadget, the Boxee Box.

The hardware, which is made by home-networking giant D-Link, is unusual-looking but cool, shaped as if it were a cube of plastic sinking into the table. Because of its height, it won't fit on a narrow entertainment center shelf, and it doesn't go nicely in front of the TV, either. You need to find a tall shelf somewhere.

On the back is an ethernet cable for internet connectivity (or you can use Wi-Fi), an HDMI port for connecting to your TV (it supports 1080p video output), and two USB ports for connecting external hard drives. There's also an SD card slot on the front for viewing photos and videos from memory cards.

The dual-sided remote is clever: You can navigate most of Boxee's onscreen menus with the simpler side: It's got a play/pause button, a D-pad, and a menu button. Any time you need to enter some text, you just flip the remote over, turn it sideways, and start thumb-typing on the tiny but usable QWERTY.

The remote sometimes gets confused if you press buttons on both sides at once, which is easy to do unless you hold it carefully. Also, entering passwords using the QWERTY (as you have to do for secured Wi-Fi networks and to access your Boxee account) is extremely frustrating, especially if your passwords have a mix of upper and lower case, because you can't see what you're typing on the screen.

Once you've got it set up, Boxee lets you navigate through TV shows and movies in its system. These are a really mixed bag, ranging from mainstream TV hits like Glee to truly awful C-list comedies and bizarre independent films you've never heard of, like The Auteur. Disappointingly, some shows are listed in Boxee's menus, but won't actually play when you select them.

I had better luck with the videos recommended by my Boxee-using friends, and videos I'd saved using Boxee's "watch later" bookmarklet, which lets me stop wasting time at work so I can waste time at home instead. (Except with Vimeo videos: For some reason the bookmarklet isn't able to reliably identify these videos on web pages.)

Web videos from these two queues worked fine, although the interface was sometimes jarring; It would launch a browser window, briefly show the entire YouTube interface, and then switch into full-screen mode.

It's here that I came up against Boxee's biggest problem: It's only as good as the web video it delivers, and there is an awful lot of web video that can only be described as crappy. Poorly edited, low-quality clips are one thing. But when you blow them up onto a 47-inch screen in all their pixelized glory, they look terrible.

Even professionally shot and edited video from the likes of the BBC looked poor, because it had been down-sampled to fit a tiny YouTube video window, and then was being blown up again on my TV. It was like using a high-end stereo system to play an MP3 of a cassette tape of a CD.

Worse, videos that seemed funny and entertaining when I was at work often fell flat when I was at home on the couch. Maybe it's because I was no longer procrastinating, and maybe it's because of the pixelizing, but the joy was just sucked out of them.

The upshot is that Boxee's slate of available video comes nowhere near being well-rounded enough to satisfy even my meager TV-watching needs. Add in its interface quirks and the poor quality of so much of the available video, and you've got an attractive but nearly useless piece of TV room furniture.

WIRED Promise of easy-to-access internet video. Works with a wide range of video services, including Netflix and Vudu. "Watch later" button lets you time-shift YouTube videos from work to home.

TIRED Quirky interface. Some TV shows appear in the menu, but won't actually play. Much of the web's video actually looks really terrible when blown up on a big HDTV.

See Also:

• What You Need to Know When Buying a Media Streamer
• WDTV Live Hub Is Like Methadone for Media Junkies
• Battle of the Boxes: Apple TV vs. Western Digital and Seagate