My 2nd gen Intel Mini noticably spins up the fans if you try to play a DVD even if you rip it to the HD first.

Cheap? Try free!

Our Ooma box has saved us literally thousands of dollars in the six months we have been in Mexico. Well, not really, because if we had been paying the piratical international call rates, we wouldn't have made all those hour-long phone calls to friends in Florida, California, Alaska, and all points North.

[unabashed plug]
On the unlikely chance that someone here doesn't know about Ooma, it is a box that with internet access (just access, a cable modem or DSL line, no computer required) connects to your ordinary telephone and gives you VOIP access to any telephone in the world. Calls are free to the country that hosts your phone number (you can port your existing number to Ooma) and are inexpensive to other countries (example: China 2.5 cents a minute, United Kingdom 1.9 cents a minute). Sound quality is excellent, far superior to Vonage or Skype, and is indistinguishable to my ear from POTS. In operation it is absolutely transparent, you pick up your phone and dial (or answer it when it rings) and that's it.
[/plug]

tanstaafl.

The Vonage box I've got does the same as your Ooma box. There is a setting on the Vonage admin website that allows you to adjust the quality.

Hmm, I tend to find Skype (when doing computer to computer, my main use) is noticeably higher quality then POTS. Not sure about their calls to normal phones though. I'm probably on Skype using it around 8-9 hours a week talking to friends back in Colorado.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a monthly fee for Vonage? With Ooma, you can get a premiere account with added benefits, but for the basic service you only have to pay for the hardware and the service is completely free.

I could have sworn there was another reason I recommended Ooma over Vonage to my parents about 3 years ago, but I can't remember it at this point. I think the free thing was the basic reason. Basically it allowed my parents (now just my mom) to save an incredible amount on phone service. I think the cost of equipment was made up for about 18 months ago, so now my mom is getting great savings out of it.

And I definitely think the call quality is excellent - better than POTS.

*edit*
If anyone is considering moving from a POTS service, the international calling is ridiculous too. I had my mom put $10 in her Ooma calling "bank," and now she can call her friend in London for at least 9 hours without running out of money.

No clue. Just saying that Vonage do a box that does similar things in regards to computerless operation and adjustable call quality. I've never used Ooma.

You have no clue whether you pay for Vonage?

No clue about Ooma :P I've no idea whether it requires fees or a special invite from the CEO of AT&T to use. My post wasn't to point out that Vonage is exactly like Ooma just that you can get VoIP ATA boxes that do what the Ooma box does.

True, though I was saying what Ooma does. And what it does, it does for free, which I consider to be a pretty big feature that no other device can match

New 360 is guaranteed to never RROD.

Well, Bruno, looks like you were correct to be wary of the Tegra 2. It seems that Boxee made a very last minute change to Atom CE4100. They say it'll be able to pull off everything they want to do, so I'll trust them. I do wonder about such a switch so late in the game, though.

Still, I think I'll be preordering tomorrow

I meant to update the thread when I found out about the hardware change and pre-orders sometime last week (or was it the week before?) Oops.

Boxee works on PCs now, and the Boxee Box was a small PC by all accounts and remains so now. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be an issue, as the hardware is pretty straight forward. The software is where all the problems can come up.

I'm still REALLY waiting for them to fix the skip/seek performance. If you queue up more than a couple of skip operations the video playback just stops for an inordinate amount of time. I want (need) to be able to hold down any of the skip commands and have Boxee whip through the video for as long as I'm holding and start playback immediately when I release.

Does Amazon charge your card when you pre-order? I'd do it, but I'm curious as to where else the box will be available. I'd rather pay for it out of my PayPal account than get charged extra points by my credit card company for a currency conversion plus convenience charge.

I'm keen to get the Boxee Box, but I'm going to wait to see what Google TV ends up looking like. Part of me even wants to replace my overheating failure of a 1st-gen AppleTV with the 2nd-gen version (which, presumably, won't overheat all the time). Who knows, maybe even TiVo will build some new software for its Premiere to do all this stuff better than presently. One way or another, it seems like we'll have some real choices this Christmas.

Google: Don't hold your breath for anything that looks even 1/4 as good as Boxee. Look at all their software, including Android. Looks like dump. With Logitech as a partner, this all but cements "ugly" and dysfunctional into the cake they're baking.

TiVo: They've had some 10 years to do SOMETHING more interesting than what they first had. They've done... Pretty much nothing except bolt on some external cruft. I stopped being impressed with TiVo back in 2005 and I don't really see them going fully mainstream in the short term.

Apple TV: Total write-off at this point. Even after a jailbreak, the hardware is far too underpowered to actually do full HD. It will forever be relegated to semi-HD.

At this point, the path looks free and clear for Boxee. Nothing else is out nor on the immediate horizon that matches it in tech specs alone, never mind design and usability. I think their $199 price is going to severely limit their penetration however. It will remain a very niche solution unless they can bring that down under $150 SRP. And they need to market it as an alternative to a DVD and BluRay player, as well as an alternative to BlockBuster- in language consumers will understand. This was the biggest mistake TiVo made early on - if they had just advertised it as a digital replacement for your VCR they'd have more easily captured mindshare which they'd have had a better time converting to market share, instead of giving all the copycats years to supplant them.

Oh and regardless of the platform and price, there's always going to be some joker that thinks he can build a micro PC based on an NVIDIA ION platform for less money. When they've spent $300+ and are still left with essentially a box of loose parts and completely crap integration, maybe they'll clue in. An ION system, with all requisite pieces, including software, is still a $400+ proposition.

I'm still puzzled as to why exactly they made the new Apple TV. Hardwarewise, its very similar to the old one except no HD and its an ARM instead of x86 processor. Neither supports 1080 output at all which is pretty lame considering how widespread 1080 is these days. You could argue that streaming 1080 would be rough but you could have 1080 content on your computer somewhere else.


Yeah. You'd do it either for the challenge of doing it or because you want to customise it. If you're doing it to be cheap then you've already lost the battle before you even started.

I bought an Ion box to do just that. Got it set up in a few days running off of an SD card. Once I get an ethernet cable run, I'll be moving it to PXE booting. Either way, the only moving part is a case fan, which is a little louder than I was hoping, but is still quieter than the fan in my DLP TV set.

I do have a couple of problems. The interface sometimes gets bogged down, but I'm 99% sure this is due to the SD card being slow during filesystem syncs. And my HDMI audio driver doesn't like mono.

All in all, though, I'm pretty pleased with it. I spent more on it than a Boxee Box would have cost, but I'm left with a system that I can reuse for other things. And that is, you know, regular-shaped. (I wonder if a third party will produce a stand for the Boxee Box that will replace its missing corner.) Plus it was a fun little mini-project.

$20-$40 final BOM cost, including manufacturing.

That's why Apple produced the new Apple TV. The old one was pretty much a Mac. This one is pretty much a cut-down iPod Touch.

Ah. Guess it makes sense. Is the Apple TV still Steve's "hobby"? Higher chance of it actually being popular this time around as more people are experimenting with streaming video.

When it was announced at the press conference, it was introduced as "One more hobby," so no, Steve doesn't think of it as a big focus of the company.

The entire reason for being of the new AppleTV is the lower price. $99 is very good, but the new box really doesn't do anything new. Netflix simply isn't good enough anymore because Netflix is everywhere.

However, I do think that Boxee has a tough road ahead with that $199 price tag. I think it's worth it, but it won't have mass appeal with that price and without the average consumer being able to grasp what exactly the box does.

Hmmm... Someone else said that earlier...



There are various mental pricing barriers where one feels comfortable with an impulse purchase. $199 is just past that, IMO, but $149 is not. It's only $50, but that $50 might as well be another $200 to the psyche. What's worse is that their SRP is actually $229. I'm not sure if this is a case of DLINK being greedy and simply averse to the amount of up-front tooling and expense they may be on the line for. At CES another Boxee-enabled product was announced, but I can't remember what it was - it was from a relatively unknown producer.

That odd box shape must have added a few bucks to the cost...

Ah, didn't see that part of the post. I'm in a skimming mode today. Not all there...


Oh I definitely agree with the mental barriers of different price levels. That's why Apple will do well despite not doing a thing with the new AppleTV. $99 is an extremely compelling price for a gadget, even for people not that into gadgets. These days, $99 is an impulse purchase, especially for an Apple product.

As for the $229 price, I really have no idea where that came from and why they even dared to put that out there. Is that a legal issue? Is it a marketing thing? Are they thinking that people will look at that and say "oh, wow, it's usually $30 more (even though it hasn't even been released yet), I'd better snatch it up!" That's a bad move. I even sent a message to Boxee on Twitter, which they initially misread (it shows you the kind of ADD people a company has on Twitter if they misread less than 140 characters), and then simply said "the price for the user is $199."

Oh well, I pre-ordered one about 20 minutes ago. I still can't tell if it bills you right away, but I'll check my account later and see.

I'm actually starting to think the $99 Apple TV is also meant for more when used in a household with multiple Apple devices. Testers of iOS 4.2 on iPads are reporting AirPlay controls show up not only in Apple's own apps, but 3rd party ones like Netflix, BBC News and so on. It's not completely clear though right now how universal this is, and knowing how much Hulu hates their content on TVs, there may be a way for apps to disable this option.

Oh, I'm sure it is, and if I were in one of those households, I'd probably get one, but only my wife has an iPhone, and that feature isn't cool enough (and she doesn't watch any videos on her phone) to get me to buy one. Airplay is a nice bonus feature, but not a good selling point.

Going by the devices that are listed on the Hulu Plus site I don't think this true any longer.
If Boxee was $99 I'd have on on order, and the same for Apple TV if it did Hulu. Meanwhile I keep hoping that Roku will add support for Hulu.

Apple's $99 pricepoint on the new AppleTV puts it fully into "impulse buy" territory. It also pulls the rug out from under Boxee and everybody else who thought they could be profitable by pricing themselves in the same ballpark as the old AppleTV.

I'll bet that most consumers wouldn't know or care about the 720p vs. 1080p issue. They just know that they can click a button and be watching their movies.

I think this is best written as simply "...watching movies" - "their" movies may not be compatible with the Apple TV and making such movies so would require many clicks and potentially a bit of technical know-how.

Some AppleTV-related news (from last week with an update from this week) - NBC/Universal think that 99 cents RENTAL per TV episode is too low. Exact words from Zucker, "We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content"

Hoho.. Ok Jeff. I personally think that 99 cents is twice as much as I'd be willing to pay. I can't imagine that at 99 cents, even after Apple's cut, that the networks would be making less from this than they do from broadcast and cable. Do they make even close to 99 cents per viewer via traditional TV? I strongly doubt it.

I get the same episodes in better quality for free, over the air, all without using up ISP bandwidth and I can replay them over and over without commercials for as long as I want.

I think Jeff's involvement with Hulu is clouding his judgement.

If that's all he said couldn't he have just as easily meant it's too much? (Pigs fly, too)

Really, is this reaction a surprise? These media companies have never been interested in passing along the savings of moving to a digital age to the consumer. It seems they think I can't figure out in my head that it costs them less to sell an album digitally than in physical form. I know the argument is that now you can buy the tracks you want, but I'm not one of the people that buys music like that. I buy albums, so I'm getting screwed.

So I say: screw you, Jeff Zucker.