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Build a BoxeeBox and Wean Yourself From Cable
Since I've been having serious problems with satellite all week,
DeviceGuru's submission was really interesting to me. He says "Inspired by Roku's awesome Netflix video download box and impressed with Boxee's free A/V media center platform, it was merely a matter of time before DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum would create the BoxeeBox, an Ubuntu-powered HTPC with Boxee serving as its primary media center UI. Based on a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, the BoxeeBox has the look and feel of consumer A/V equipment and packs 2GB RAM, 1TB HDD, CD/DVD drive, USB, Firewire, HDMI, DVI-D, RGB, and 8-channel surround sound audio."
That's nice and all, but how about something sub $300. If one of these can be built sub $200 (including the tuner), I would buy it today.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you don't want DIY and something non-geek friendly for ~$200 check out the popcornhour network media tanks. Streams from a server or user-installed hard disk. Plays x264, divx, xvid, wmv, etc all at up to 1080p.
We own two and just love them.
Trolling is a art,
It's back up for me, but here is a cached version just in case:
http://74.125.47.132/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.deviceguru.com%2Fthe-boxeebox-cookbook%2F
TFS makes it sound like you can replace your cable (or satellite) provider with this box. Where is the (non-OTA) broadcast content coming from. Has he made a wife-capable Hulu scraper? If so, and Hulu agrees not to break the box every couple of months, then I'm interested. If it's just "you can download stuff that's a year old and on DVD from netflix, do OTA, and access your personal media collection," then it's really not much better than what already exists.
Unless it's that he's put it into a nice looking box. In which case...he's just discovered the world of HTPC cases.
I'd love to believe, but without an article I'm puzzled at where the novelty is.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Since the site is slashdotted and the summary is a little shy on details, can someone summarize how this thing works without cable? I know you can torrent some shows and watch some on sites like hulu, but that doesn't really "replace cable" (especially if you watch HD content). So how does this media center work with no cable input?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Skipping unnecessary characters such as "b", "e", and "," can make all the difference!
And this basically sums up my experience with these devices over the past couple of years. Getting any pc to do decent tv-out is a nightmare (Modeline Hell as he calls it). Getting sound on both regular outputs and digital outputs with Alsa is "challenging" to say the least. And then I just want the box to suspend and wake-up using a remote. Again, that's possible in theory, but somehow I've never found a board that will reliably go into S3 and wakeup from S3 over and over again. If you finally get it to work once, it suddenly doesn't work the second time.
Finally, I've just switched to a UPNP frontend for my Mythtv backend. It turns on and off in 5-10 secs, does both analog and digital audio outputs and I've never had issues with its tv outputs. I've lost some functionality, but at least it's reliable and "just works".
Buy a used xbox from someplace that lets your look at it first.
Who has tried this at a local GameStop or somewhere? Or where else would you recommend that would be available to people in most parts of the United States?
Short version: if it was made before 2004, it's pre-1.6
The Version 1.6 Warning page states that Xbox consoles can be updated to 1.6 through the Internet. By "look at it" do you mean "turn it on before paying for it"?
You can still use a hardware mod chip on a 1.6 box.
For many users, it takes less time==money to buy a Popcorn Hour box than to learn to solder.
"Inspired" by this little $100 box, I decided to make a clone that's 30x bigger and only cost me $600.
Damn, I'm impressed. That thing must be HUGE.
Where do you put it? In spare room? In a shed out back? Please, let us know.
For those who don't wish to spend as much time assembling and tweaking, but still want to enjoy Boxee goodness; You can buy a refurbished Mac Mini, DVIHDMI dongle, and 1tb external disk for roughly the same price as the author spent on his Ubuntu rig. Boxee is available (and started) as a native OS-X application. Plus, with OS-X, you can get streaming HD Netflix.
A few quick points:
Disclaimer: your mileage, needs and interests may vary.
1) I liked MythTV on Ubuntu which I most recently installed using Mythbuntu. The Xbmc derivatives look nice, but never so compelling I actually used one (because I was already using something I liked).
2) If you plan to use it, consider not fscking with it. Having a TV on the fritz because you tweak the software constantly can sometimes be pretty annoying (maybe mostly to the *other* people).
3) Consider 2 disks. Maybe it's just me, but after a few reinstals/etc I occasionally get sloppy and screw up my partitioning.
4) Keep a hobby PC to play around (if you like to) with and let the HTPC just work TM.
5) If you have a (non-geek) wife, consider not going the home-build route and using a Xbox or something like (which, after 4 or so years is what I use, exclusively) the D-Link DSM-750 (along with a DNLA server like the cross-platform Twonky) this way you end up with a slim, attractive, wireless (803.11n), fanless, HD streaming media device that will allow you to plug your previously computer-bound content (Ogg and MKV included) directly into your HDTV (without having hassle with it).
Of all the solutions I've used this has worked the best for me. But like I said, your ymmv (and I'd be curious to hear about it).
Quack, quack.