About a week ago, when all of the Boxee hooplah was going on, I bought an Apple TV to install XBMC (XBox Media Center)/Boxee on. I have hacked a few things like the Linksys NSLU2 (aka The Slug) and I have to say, this was by far the easiest install I have ever done. I am not sure the directions are easy enough for my sister to follow, but the work is. After I put the bootloader onto a USB “stick” I popped it into the Apple TV (ATV from here on out), plugged the power cord in, and the installation went off without a hitch. It actually took me longer to figure out what I had to do to boot into Boxee than it did to install everything. I was a bit paranoid as Apple had just released a new firmware update for the ATV and had read on the Boxee forums that it would prevent XBMC and Boxee from working…so, stayed away from the “Update” selection in the menu. Well, once I clicked it, it downloaded the latest version of Boxee and we were off and running in a few minutes. I would say total install time from downloading of the bootloader to booting into Boxee was less than 15 minutes. This really only takes about 5 minutes to do.

1st Boxee ATV Setup

I first setup the ATV out in the living room, connected to a Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT. This router is running in Client-Bridge mode which means that it am connected to the main Access Point router as a bridge when a cable is plugged into the router (wireless connection is possible, you just get 1/2 the bandwidth available). I logged in (you will need a Boxee account to use Boxee) and added two shares on my network…one to a box running Windows Media Center Edition and the other is the SLUG which has all of our music.

Setting up the shares is very easy and intuitive. There is a separate area in settings for you to hard code in an SMB username and password to use by default for any SMB shares. Boxee played nicely with the Windows and Linux box right from the start. The people who built the scraping scripts for XBMC/Boxee did an awesome job. Boxee immediately started adding video files to the library…which means that you see a thumbnail of the DVD box, it pulls IMDB information about the movie including an actor list and a trailer if it can find one…nice. The music began updating, but this is part of where I think things went a bit awry. We have a lot of music. Much of it is live and not have Meta data available for it in the usual places. But, there is plenty of music in there (read A LOT) that does have Meta data. I think it might be a week long project for Boxee to retrieve everything it needs for our music.

So, I fired up a video from the Windows box….great. Boxee let’s you change aspect ratios right from the video screen to adjust fit on the fly…very nice. Boxee is also smart enough to play multi-part video files provided you use one of many (that I have found) naming schemes….basically CD1, CD2 will work…I am now using Part.x.of.x as a scheme and it works perfectly. It is nearly seamless how it goes from file one to file 2. This is something that Windows MCE would never do, score Boxee/XBMC.

Next I try to play something via the Hulu interface. Hulu is an internet video site that has some deals with a lot of television publishers. They will play advertisements at the regular commercial breaks, but here is the thing, you have access to every episode of every show that they carry series of. For instance, my favorite show, Three Sheets (Mojo Network), has every episode aired to date…very nice. Hulu worked, but then the video died, rather it crashed Boxee. I then started having intermittent problems with Boxee crashing, necessitating an unplugging of the unit. I gave it a rest, and moved it upstairs the next day.

Boxee Setup Round 2

Setup two was upstairs in the bedroom with the 42″ plasma. The bedroom is located almost directly over the wireless AP downstairs and the wifi hardware in the ATV is quite good. All of the issues we were having with the living room setup were gone. One thing to note is that I removed the music share to the linux box. I don’t really have a need to play music via the ATV…and to be honest, I have never really understood the appeal of having video of what I am listening to. I have two Audiotrons in the living room and am creating a little web app for my iphone to control them (someday). Anyway, the video playback is great for all of my divx movies. I did try to play back an HD movie the other night and it was jerky….I just don’t think the ATV has the hardware to play HD video and audio well. I will test this again, but I am confident that even with a wired gigabit setup, it would be the same.

Thoughts

So, do I like the Boxee/ATV combination? Yes, more than I thought I would. I am not really into the whole social networking aspects of Boxee, but I do like the interface and the functionality…a lot. I have been waiting for a real network video playback option. The ATV is great because it is small, silent and looks pretty cool. The remote is one of those standard iPod remotes and actually works pretty well. I would still like to have a no-nonsense all video file playback box…not sure this is it. But, will I be getting rid of this setup, definitely not. I think the next project will be to build a high horsepower, silent box to run Ubuntu and Boxee/XBMC so that I can play anything I want and have no issues…I think that setup might provide it.

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1. Website 101 – Part 1
2. 5th Gen. IPod Plays Videos and Music
3. Last.fm is the Shizzy

Copyright 2011 ©Jason Golod.