Image courtesy of Boxee.tv

I love movie night. There’s nothing better than curling up on the couch on a Sunday night with my girlfriend, watching the best content available on the Internet. That’s right, the Internet. With the sometimes limited selection that on-demand channels offer through our local cable company, I found myself lacking variety. Recently, I came into luck with a Mac mini that a friend of mine wanted to trade to me. I accepted and shortly thereafter, I found what I was looking for… sort of.

Start With The Hardware

I’d like to begin by giving a rundown of the hardware that I’ve been testing with. Most of the equipment I am using I got through trade or by holding out for a really good bargain. Just because you want a kick-ass home theatre system doesn’t mean you have to pay a huge amount of money. Below is a summary of the equipment cost of the equipment in my setup:

• Mac mini with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 512 MB RAM, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator GMA 950 with 64 MB DDR RAM. This model was known as the Early 2006 model and is no longer for sale except on eBay.  Newer models can be found here. Approx. $600; Apple.com
• 42” Magnavox Plasma TV. $400; purchased used from my neighbor who was moving
• DVI-D male to HDMI female adapter. Approx $20; Walmart
• 6’ HDMI cable. $12.99, The Optimized Cable Company
• Network connection is a Cat6 Ethernet connection to LAN with 15/2 Mbps Cable Modem Internet access. $49.99; Brighthouse/TWC
• 2.1 Stereo sound with a powered subwoofer
• Boxee Alpha software for Mac. Free; Boxee.tv

DVI vs. HDMI

The second thing I should mention is the quality of the video transmission. Since the Mac mini has a standard PC connection – DVI, or digital video interface – it must be converted to a transmission method that the plasma TV can understand. Unless you have an early model widescreen or digital television, you probably won’t have a DVI port on your television which means you’ll need an adapter. My plasma television has two HDMI ports but no DVI ports, so I needed such an adapter to convert the signal from the Mac to my television. I picked mine up for around $20 at Walmart. It’s worth noting here that high definition signals are produced by hardware’s internal components and not by cables or software. Keep in mind that no amount of cables or adapters can change that. The purpose of my article isn’t to go into great detail about HD video though, so you can read about the specifications here.

Getting Quality Audio

Boxee will let you tweak the settings inside the application itself, but I would recommend you let your surround sound receiver do all of the work. My setup isn’t quite as fancy as some of those premium systems you find at your local big box store, however, it’s just as functional. I have a 2.1 channel system with simple large bookshelf speakers and a powered subwoofer. For most action movies, it works just fine with the power you need on those big explosions but can still handle the quiet dialogue moments you find a lot in dramas. Most budget PCs won’t have an option for digital audio out, but you can get the same effect for less with a simple male-to-male cable from your media center computer to your receiver. The hard part is trying to determine what size connector you will need.

The Boxee Applications page. Image courtesy of Boxee.tv

All About Boxee

Boxee brings you the best of multimedia content direct to your home media center with any operating system platform. It will run on Windows, Mac, Linux and even your Apple TV. Installing the software is a breeze and you can sync up your account to multiple PC’s. For example, I have Boxee installed on my Mac mini in the media center at home and I have it installed on my laptop for those times when I want to kick back with some streaming media when I’m on the road. I should say here that a healthy amount of bandwidth is required to have a seamless Boxee experience, so those of you on lower end DSL connections or dial-up should take heed – your experience may not optimal. In addition to playback of the existing media files on your hard drive, Boxee will stream content from a wealth of studios such as CBS with the use of “applications” within the software.  The only thing I found disappointing was the lack of network stations, ABC and NBC especially, offering quality content.  While this content is accessible on Hulu, only time will tell if this is a viable strategy for those networks.  Most of the media you’ll find online will be from non-mainstream networks such as Comedy Central and even some online resources like YouTube.  Still, I think this is a burgeoning business in lieu of the strangle hold modern cable companies have on our world today.

If anyone remembers the days of The Screensavers and Call for Help on TechTV, you’ll also be impressed at the quality of content coming from Revision3’s shows like HDNation and Techzilla. Leo Laporte also streams high quality video through his TWiT application. The best thing I’ve found by far is the ability to back inside the classroom with Open Courseware’s availability of courses from schools such as MIT, Yale, Harvard and others. These days, I’m engrossed in a MIT course on Intellectual Property law.  It’s quite fascinating.

The Netflix application in Boxee. Image courtesy of Boxee.tv

The other big draw for me was the tight integration between Boxee and Netflix. My girlfriend has been begging for some time to get a Netflix account, but I couldn’t stand snail-mailing DVDs back and forth between locations. Now we can simply fill up our queue with movies we want to watch (they have quite a selection of classics), and watch them at our leisure. Granted, I haven’t done a whole lot of movie watching via this method, but from what I am able to tell, it beats the theater experience at a fraction of the cost with an investment in the right surround sound equipment.  The video quality leaves a little to be desired: there is a significant amount of artifact present.  Unless you’re a diehard for perfect picture quality, you might be able to tolerate this.  I noticed it only because I’m use to perfect 1080p quality broadcasts of the Colts games and other on-demand content from my cable provider.

Summary

My opinion of the current setup I’m using is pretty positive.  It’s a good setup for anyone wanting to start with adding a digital media center to their current home entertainment setup.  In my example I used a Mac, however Boxee is available for other operating systems as previously mentioned so it’s worth a shot on a variety of platforms.  The biggest thing you’ll need to watch is your bandwidth.  Without a massive amount of bandwidth at your disposal, it might cloud your judgment of streaming media.  Remember, streaming audio and streaming video require completely different amounts and it pays not to be cheap here.

There are also other forms of media center software: Front Row and XBMC most notably.  Front Row is Apple’s foray into media center software.  I tried this for a while and eventually found it lacking for a truly immersive theater experience.  XMBC is a good choice for those hardcore media buffs that really want to geek out the media center in their home.  It can be customized with themes, but lacks the customizable applications available in Boxee.  Boxee’s core is built on top of XBMC.

In short, if you’re looking for an alternative to the traditional on-demand content provided by your cable company, Boxee is definitely worth a try.

Who knows, you might even consider dumping cable.  ;)

John Fox : Starting at the age of 6, John was always fascinated with computers. His first machine, an IBM PCjr, had him hooked and from that sparked a love affair with technology. Creating webpages at the age of 12 and the advent of social media that came about in his 20's, he started his own media company, New Media Designs, in 2009. Due to the success of IndyGeek.net, New Media Designs' flagship product, the NMD brand was stopped in April 2010 and IndyGeek became the name of the company founded by Fox, his wife Esther and Alex Conner.