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Last year I bought myself a little present for Christmas. I got the Boxee Box by link. For those of you not familiar with boxee it is a piece of software built on the XBMC platform. I did have boxee installed on a Linux machine until the CPU melted down on me.

I had been following the development of this little box on the site and thought what the hell I might as well get myself a treat. Once it arrived I set it up in the living room hooked up to my HD tv. I had all my films and tv shows backhoes unto my pc and so I pointed the media source on the boxee box to my windows 7 machine.

It took a long time for it to scrape the folders and populate the meta data. Once it had finished I tried to watch a movie. It started playing fine but after a few minutes it began to stutter and lose sync. I thought this was down to the size of the file (mkv 8GB) but sadly it was happening on smaller files. This issue has since been fixed with a firmware update but I went a different route in the end.

I had a 2TB external hardrive lying around that I wasn’t using. I moved all my content onto this drive and connected it to the boxee box via USB. I also enabled the sharing option which effectively turns the boxee box into a nas server. The box scraped the media folders much faster than before and all my files played perfectly.

Additionally there is a lot of online content provided through apps that can be downloaded directly from boxee or independent repositories. It’s great for watching Engadget, the escapist magazine and BBC iplayer.

Now that a lot of the bugs have been worked out with the latest firmware I would have no problem recommending this bit of kit to anyone, if you’re American though there is an ongoing issue with hulu which is restricting the content. Keep an eye on that in the future if you’re on the other side of the pond. Also check out http://forums.boxee.com for other news about it.

Now there is one thing that has let the box down and that is the remote. It’s very nice and works well with a full qwerty keyboard on the back. The only problem is that the keyboard keys are dark grey letters on black buttons that make it near impossible to use at night.

Check out the following link for some great tips on getting the best from your boxee box: http://lzt.co/f