Boxee first impressions and cutting the cord

[UPDATE]: after playing around more with it, I realized that there really isn't an easy way to pull down the shows I want, and since Vudu is broken, there is no way to get new movies either. I still like it, and will choose it over TW Cable, but the way it is now, it is not for everyone.

Its finally here! My Boxee box came in the mail yesterday - good job Amazon, only took 2 days! - and I got to set it up and play with it.

I heard about Boxee and their plans to release an actual hardware device for a while, but was skeptical, since being a programmer, I can build one from parts from Newegg and put Linux on it. Then, I went to the Boxee box NYC launch party, and I was sold. These guys did exactly that - got some hardware parts and slapped Linux on it - only they got very nice hardware parts and they actually wrote a great piece of software to sit on top.

First of all, it really is smaller than you think. It also has a nice, dense feel to it. It looks like some Dali-esque melting cube, so my TV counter just got slightly more awesome and avant-garde.

The hardware itself is very impressive. Everything I played from the internet or from my media server did not lag at all.

The box has 2 USB ports, 1 HDMI, 1 GB Ethernet, WiFi, S/PDIF sound output and regular RC sound output. There is also an SD/MMC slot on a side. There is much more about the hardware here.

My reason behind getting Boxee is to "cut the cord" - get rid of Time Warner cable which has been gouging almost $200/mo (1 Boxee box) from us for 4 shows and occasional movie that we watch.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts as well as some pros and cons and how they compare to their monopoly-operated counterparts:

The Remote.

The remote overall is very good. It has a good feel to it, the buttons offer just the right amount of resistance when pressed, and its significantly smaller than our TW remote - which is impressive considering how much more you can do with Boxee than with our cable box.

Pro: Fully RF Remote. No matter where I point it, it always works! TW remote sucks. And we keep loosing the battery covers. (Boxee uses a CR2032 battery which slides inside)

Con: Fully RF Remote. Half of the time I have no idea which way I'm pointing it, so I keep hitting Pause button instead of Menu and vice versa.

Big Con: Remote has no volume control! -- I am slightly stupid, so I didn't realize that you can press the Up/Down main nav buttons during watching to control sound. RTFM eh.

Con: The QWERTY keyboard is on one side, and the menu and pause buttons are on the other side, so often when I typed I would hit menu or pause. Not really a big deal, but can be a little annoying.

The Software.

The software is very responsive, there is never any lag, except for when something needs to be pre-buffered from the net, and TW Cable cannot even compare in features.

The best feature in my opinion is apps - there is everything from YouTube to Pandora to YouPorn (you can enable/disable adult content and put a lock on it)

Huge Pro: When I added my media server network share, Boxee catalogued the videos and presented me with a list of DVD covers, ratings, and movie info! That is truly awesome.

Pro: The RSS Reader app has MiroGuide in it - Miro was my previous choice for cord-cutting.

Pro: Compared to TW Cable, the Boxee software FLIES! TW Cable is always slow, and often our TV screen will just go blank and say "Please Wait...". Please give me my money back, jerks.

Pro: Supports multiple Boxee accounts, with their own Facebook/Twitter linked accounts.

Interesting Pro: You can point box's syslog to another location.

Huge Con: Vudu did not work. It says "coming soon" and yet at the launch party I've see it work. I did the software update and that did not help.

Huge Con: There is no easy way to watch the 4 shows which I pay so much money for - Weeds, Dexter, True Blood and Boardwalk Empire. Presumably you can find them online and play them through the Boxee browser, but I wasn't able to find an easy way to just search and play. Also, Netflix and Hulu should be coming soon, so hopefully this will become easier.

Huge Con: There is a movie list, but most things are either obscure or some sort of student shorts. This of course can be great, because you can find things you never knew existed, but I do need my blockbuster fix here and there too.

Con: Cannot tell if something I'm about to watch is in HD or not. For some reason, most TV shows I tried weren't.

Con: The box asked me if I want to get suggestions from Facebook/Twitter, I said yes, but as always, suggestions are hard - all i saw were suggestions by my Boxee friends - not some sort of AI-driven, natural language processing, social network scraping uber-suggestion bot. I guess may be in the next version..

The Box.

The design is absolutely awesome. That said, it could really use a clock on it, especially if since I'm going to be throwing out my cable box which is the only way I can tell how long I've wasted on watching TV.

Con: No clock!

Overall:

The content available mostly sucks. If you just want TV shows, without Vudu, Netflix and Hulu you're kind of screwed for the moment. However, for me - cord-cutting FTW! I don't mind going the extra step to find the content I like, and I do enjoy all the indie content from around the web. Boxee isn't perfect (yet), but its still better - and cheaper - than TW cable, if you have my viewing habits.