Boxee Live TV

Scott Greczkowski

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Sep 7, 2003
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Got my Boxee Live TV USB adapter tonight, first some un boxing pics.
 

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Sorry for the sideways pics, I will have to fix those later and reupload them. :)

Anyways came in and before hooking up the adapter I took the new Boxee Software download. Once that was done and the Boxee Box Rebooted I then plugged in the Boxee Live TV USB Adapter, within a few second I now had a live TV icon on the screen. Selected Live TV and it took me through the setup.

Setup was easy only asking me my zipcode, then it did a scan of the channels to see what it could find. With using the included antenna (which hides a standard silver telescopic antenna inside which must be raised in order to get anything) it found a total of 16 OTA channels. By watching Live TV I was impressed with the guide, it was easy to use and needed no manual. But one thing I did not like is on everytime I changed my channel it posted what I was watching on facebook... so I turned off the social integration and solved that problem.

The PQ looks good and nice and sharp, but was losing signal a lot.

I then unhooked the included antenna and hooked it up to my rooftop antenna, and did another rescan now instead of 16 channels I now had 28. The tuner is not as sensitive as the one built into my panasonic TV which picks up 34 channels.

Twice while watching TV I lost audio, exiting back to the Boxee home screen audio returned there, but going into Live TV again still had no audio, the only fix was to shut down and then restart the box. This has happened twice so far.

In addition I notice that the usb adapter gets REALLY hot, almost too hot to touch.

About the only thing it does not do that I would love for it to do is to record to an external hard drive. If it did that the Boxee Box could be the ultimate Home Theater Accessory.
 
Download the Free Boxee Software and try it for yourself and see. :)

(The Boxee Box basically is the same software but it does not need a dedicated computer to use it)
 
I had the orginal roku when it was a netflix only box and liked it befor it died. I just don't see paying the 179 pricetage when roku starts at 60 but I do like how I can turn a pc into a free boxee and get a app to controll it.
 
Download the Free Boxee Software and try it for yourself and see. :)

(The Boxee Box basically is the same software but it does not need a dedicated computer to use it)

Hi Scott, I visited Boxee's website, and the say you can put together your own hardware with the
addition of their software.

They didn't say anything about "minimum system requirements". Any chance you might have some recommendations?

I have a spare PC with a 2GHz processor, 1Gb RAM, a 126mb video card and a decent sound card. Do you think
this machine would cut it for streaming with the Boxee software?

Thanks, --Kev--.
 
Hi Scott, I visited Boxee's website, and the say you can put together your own hardware with the
addition of their software.

They didn't say anything about "minimum system requirements". Any chance you might have some recommendations?
The software is FREE, download it and try it and see how it runs for you. :)

If it works great, if it don't then it didn't cost you anything.
 
From their website:
[h=2]PC Software[/h] Boxee currently runs on the following systems:

  • Windows XP\Vista\7 (32-bit & 64-bit)
  • Mac OS X 10.5 or higher (Intel processor based only)
  • Ubuntu Linux (32-bit & 64-bit)
[h=3]Hardware Requirements*[/h]
  • x86 (Intel/AMD processor) based system running at 1.0GHz or greater
  • 512MB system memory (RAM) or more
[h=3]Video Card*[/h] Graphics controller/card/adapter and device drivers capable of:

  • OpenGL 1.4 (+ GLSL) or higher
  • Direct X 9.0 (Windows)
  • 32-bit colors or more
* these are minimums
 
Sorry if this isn't the right thread to ask this question but if web browsing on my HDTV is something I wanted to do, is the Boxee the best set top box to do this with?