Digital Home Thoughts: I Pre-Ordered a Boxee Box: Have You?

Last week, I placed a pre-order for a Boxee Box (you can too via this handy pre-order link!). Why? Well, I've been watching the network/local media player space evolve over the past few years, and I've yet to implement any of them. I've seen two basic types of devices:

1. Devices that offer superior technical capabilities in terms of files (ISO rips, etc.) and formats supported (every video codec under the sun), but lack any semblance of true usability, often featuring awful user interface, painful performance, or both. I'd put most of the dedicated network media players in this camp; Popcorn Hour, efforts from Seagate, Western Digital, Asus, etc.
2. Devices that offer superior user interface and usability, but lack broad technical abilities; they're often limited in terms of file types (no ISO support), codecs, and are very mainstream in their support of content. I'd put Windows Media Center, and anything based on that (Media Center Extenders), in this category along with the Xbox 360, Apple TV, etc.

I've wanted a device that does both, and it looks like the Boxee Box may be the closest I've come so far. I've messed around with several of these devices over the years; I even bought an Acer Aspire Revo and installed XBMC on it in the hopes that I'd finally be able to do what I wanted. It failed.

The primary goal? Being able to rip ISOs of my DVDs and play them back from my Windows Home Server, with automatically generated cover art and meta data. Why ISOs? Speed, quality, and features. Transcoding a DVD is slow, and you lose quality; keeping the DVD in ISO format means the file size is big, but the quality is retained and ripping an ISO is faster than transcoding to an MPEG4/h.264 format. Besides, big hard drives aren't very expensive any more. Features matter too: if I watch a movie, then I want to watch the special features, having them all there in ISO format is the best way to do that.

XBMC really seemed like the best way to accomplish that task, but the UI quirks drove me slowly nuts over a period of weeks; it's open source software that seems designed by committee without anyone having a singular vision of what the software is supposed to accomplish. It's made by geeks, for other geeks, and while I saw the gems of something really great, it lacked the polish I was looking for. I didn't want to have something I needed to fight with. There's a right way and a wrong way to do a media-focused OS, and XBMC just got too many things wrong in my book.

That's what's so appealing about the Boxee Box: it has all the technical chops of XBMC (and then some), along with very capable hardware from Dlink, and the user interface polish that comes from a team of people who know what they're trying to accomplish. Even if I only use the Boxee Box to watch DVDs, it will be worth it to me. I can't wait!