Hey guys,
I just got back from CES and I was able to spend a decent amount of time at both the D-Link and NVIDIA booths where the BoxeeBox was being shown. I have to say that I was really impressed. The box is pretty small and although I am not in love with the design it does kind of grow on you. The remote was my favorite part of the whole thing. I feel like they nailed it. I was able to chat with Avner Ronen about the box the box and he told me that D-Link spent almost 80% of their budget on the design of the remote. Just like the other reviews out their on the net say the keyboard feels great. Whether or not I get a boxeebox I plan on getting one of their remotes.
The tegra2 platform seems to show a lot of promise. I have not spent enough time with the Boxee Beta vs. a complex XBMC skin to be a true judge on the performance of the hardware but I was impressed with how fluid the UI was running. As far as video playback goes they weren't doing much in the way of demoing that at the show (mostly because content owner's often wander the show and make people stop showing stuff that they don't have permission to showing). They didn't show anything but the UI at the NVIDIA booth but they were showing a brief clip of Disney's Cars in 1080p at the D-Link booth. I know that the clip they were playing was in the .MP4 container but I don't know anything about the bitrate of the file. (I actually crashed one of their demo boxes when I convinced the girl running the demo to press 'O' on the keyboard in hopes of pulling up the codec info about the Cars file. She was nice and didn't really know how to reset the box so I felt really bad that I was responsible for the crash. I helped her power-cycle the box but it took forever to boot since it was booting off of a thumb drive) I tried to get some details about box's ability to decode HD video codecs but the D-Link and Boxee folks couldn't really tell me except to say that the box was still in development and those details would be forthcoming. They did seem to be confident that the box would be able to play 'Blu-ray back-ups.'
I wasn't satisfied with that answer so I finally found someone in the NVIDIA booth that could tell me what I wanted to know. Unfortunately guys the news is not good. The Tegra2 chipset is able to play 1080p High Profile H.264 ... BUT ... according to the guy I talked to at the NVIDIA booth it only has enough MIPS to play High Profile stuff under 10 Mbits/sec (I was able to back this up with the info provided by AnandTech
here. AnandTech says "Tegra's video decode processor accelerates up to 1080p high profile H.264 video at bitrates in the 10s of megabits per second." ) This means that most of the Blu-ray rips that are out there on the net that have been re-encoded should work but not straight Blu-ray rips. If this is important to you then ION chipset is still going to be the way to go. I was pretty disappointed to find this out because the footprint and power consumption of the Tegra2 is awesome!
I did learn some other great info from the NVIDIA guy too. You can get a Tegra2 dev board for $400 right now by signing up at developer.nvidia.com/tegra. The dev board is almost identical to the BoxeeBox except that it has a few more ports and 1GB of internal memory vs. 512MB of the BoxeeBox. According to NVIDIA the BoxeeBox should be able to be used as a development platform once it is launched (The NVIDIA guy plans on directing people to the BoxeeBox for development purposes once it is launched because of it's cheaper costs. He also hopes they can sell the dev kits for less in the future once they can be manufactured in China instead of California) I am sorry for the long winded post. If anybody has any questions about something I failed to mention I will do my best to answer them. As for now, it's time to go and watch a movie on my XBMC setup.
XBMC FTW!
