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Boxee Box Pre-Orders Start At $229

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the a-little-late-i-think dept.

Engadget is reporting that Boxee is taking pre-orders at $229 for their set-top box that is utterly guaranteed to not fit into any stereo component rack you might have. They also have switched chipsets from the Tegra 2 to the CE4100. I'm not sure about this thing, but I'd sure like to play with one as I lust for the day when every piece of media I have can be played from a single device. I suspect it'll never happen.

7 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. 'All in one media player' exists already... by Lukano · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, the 'all in one' solution you dream of exists - in XBMC. A cheap Atom/ION nettop for ~$200, install XBMC (live, ubuntu, win7, doesn't matter) and go to town.

    1. Re:'All in one media player' exists already... by FrYGuY101 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not trolling, but how's 1080p x264 playback with that setup? I have a Popcorn Hour A100 (old-school) that does it all except DTS audio... :\

      Fantastic.

      The important bit to note is the ION. If you have a NVidia GPU, you can use the Live or Linux (And at this point, I think the Windows version supports GPU acceleration) versions, and if you enable VDPAU (Or the Windows equivalent), and it will happily accelerate the video. I get full 1080p playback with no dropped frames or stuttering on a Asus AspireRevo that is almost completely silent.

      --
      "If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."

      - Seneca
  2. Re:Intel CE4100... Where Can I find more about it? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hardware acceleration. The CE4100 is an integrated CPU + GPU package from what I can tell - the Atom core itself is kind of weak, but the integrated GPU on that particular part is what handles all of the heavy lifting for VC-1, MPEG-2, and H.264.

    A normal Atom CPU can achieve the same thing when paired with a capable video chipset - however it usually doesn't have a capable video chipset paired to it.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  3. Details from the article by slapout · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Update: We just learned that Amazon will be selling it for $199, though the MSRP will remain $229.

    At a rendezvous in San Francisco, Avner Ronen told us the decision to abandon Tegra 2 was about performance and nothing more: "The major problem we had with the Tegra 2 was support for high-profile HD playback," he said. "You can do high-profile VC-1 with Tegra 2, but not H.264." It was a problem of bitrate, he told us, and while NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra T20 was apparently not up to the task, the team had internally tested Intel's CE4100 decoding streams at up to 90 megabits per second. The newly revamped Boxee Box is now capable of 1080p H.264 playback at 60fps, and... well, that's actually about it."

    --
    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
  4. Re:Intel CE4100... Where Can I find more about it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Block Diagram here.

    That "Multi Format HW Decoder" block is probably Imagination Technologies' VXD core.

  5. Re:It's not a settop box and it's not a setbottom by jeffmeden · · Score: 4, Informative

    So you make a device that's stackable, and you know that a good number of customers prefer to put their equipment in a cabinet, and yet you blame the customers when they do so, the device creates enough heat to cook it, and it fails?

    Problem 1: not enough fans or vents / device designed for too low of a temperature envelope
    Problem 2: No hardware fail-safe / device can go into thermal run-away and not shut down before permanent damage is done

    I say that lack of very easy fixes for these two problems are *definitely* the manufacturer's fault.

  6. Re:It's not a settop box and it's not a setbottom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I prefer the open source PS3 Media Server myself.