Boxee vs. Zinc vs. Hulu 116
For those with a Windows PC and some time for TV, DeviceGuru writes "Which is the best Internet media streaming application for a media-center PC? Boxee, Zinc, or the new Hulu Desktop? A post at DeviceGuru.com reviews these three media streaming platforms and draws some interesting conclusions. Key pros and cons are tabulated and numerous screenshots are included. Interestingly, despite lots of Boxee hype, Zinc already has a number of valuable features that Boxee is scrambling to add to its next version, due out in the fall. On the other hand, Boxee boasts far more third-party content-access applications support."
None of them (Score:5, Insightful)
Since stupid rights managements mean they're only usable in one country.
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Which is an odd thing to say as things are getting better steadily and have been for a few years now (even before Obama stepped it). But other than that, yes, it's exactly like Vietnam. *yawn*
Where's the offtopic mod when we need it? Or a mod for "preaching to the choir to karma whore"?
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Since stupid rights managements mean they're only usable in one country.
Seconded.
Re:None of them (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed that they aren't too useful for me, but Boxee does torrents and runs on Linux, so it's really my only choice of the three.
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Why isn't there some company in another country trying to do the same thing? Won't be as much American TV, obviously, but surely there are European companies trying to make a European(-country) version of Boxee/Hulu/Zinc.
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As an American with taste, I'm not interested in american TV.
i actually find that the BBC and stuff made in Australia are far better and less "stupefied" than the crap we get here.
Seriously, the Us population Must be drooling morons if you base it on what is poplar on our TV networks.
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There's good stuff everywhere. Despite the fact that most of the stuff on Hulu is garbage, I still find plenty of good, fun stuff to watch. You needn't be so condescending. It's not like Britain and Australia and everywhere else doesn't have garbage TV, too.
Now, if there were a way to get BBC stuff via a Hulu-like service, I would be in hog heaven. But there's always Netflix, and for those series I really love, buying the DVDs. We have the complete Red Dwarf, Jeeves and Wooster, Monty Python, Fawlty To
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Re:None of them (Score:4, Informative)
I use Hulu from the UK through the Witopia VPN [witopia.net] service. Such services totally break IP-based location checking systems.
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I tried a couple of VPN solutions, they did work but performance was terrible.
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Since stupid rights managements mean they're only usable in one country.
Uhm, Boxee has the BBC iPlayer for use in the UK, is actively trying to get Canadian content, and has many "Apps" that are location agnostic.
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Urgh... Why do people insist on using some overhyped, bloated services that only work in US? My favorite applications of this type are those that can be open neatly in an FF tab, without taking up half of my RAM and which reside in countries where **AA is just a funky notion those crazy Americans keep babbling about.
Because those of us in the US that want to watch US tv show content legally have to either go to the web site, or use one of the aforementioned programs? Besides, Hulu's desktop app is basically a shell around their Flash content, the overhead is nothing above and beyond the Flash CPU overhead itself. Oh, and Zinc is available as a Firefox plugin, and can be opened neatly in a FF tab.
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Because those of us in the US that want to watch US tv show content legally have to either go to the web site, or use one of the aforementioned programs? Besides, Hulu's desktop app is basically a shell around their Flash content, the overhead is nothing above and beyond the Flash CPU overhead itself. Oh, and Zinc is available as a Firefox plugin, and can be opened neatly in a FF tab.
Erm... technically speaking, watching streamed content of any kind is not illegal. It may be a whole array of other things, but illegal... no way. The burden lies with those that upload the content. Otherwise you would see a lot of YouTube users sued to smithereens. As for the "bloated" aspect, I must concede this point. Every time I see one of these interfaces my mind jumps straight to Vuze, but I admit that others with similar look might be less of a memory hog. I haven't tested any of them, so yes I adm
Zinc (Score:3, Funny)
Wasn't Zinc just proved to cause loss of smell in people? Then I guess you wouldn't be able to tell if it stinks or not!
Fixed (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed.
As a non-US resident, Mininova is still the best bang for the buck to me.
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slashdot focuses mainly on the us, but i'd like to see statistics of their userbase... i wouldn't be surprised that alot of users are from other countries, as google would seem to indicate: http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot.org [google.com]
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Don't feel singled out. By and large they're making the american people pay for their content too.
For some it doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
For some it doesn't matter. For example, if u are on linux, then it boils down to Boxee and... Boxee. (Assuming that crappy table in "conclusions" switched OS Support columns)
If you are outside US, then again, it limits your choice.
So, this might be relevant, but only for people living in US and using Windows.
Also, there are Linux only solutions, like for example MythTV, can't say about selection of videos there thou... I guess its small.
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Re:For some it doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
> I ran MythTV for 5 years. It works decently if you record a lot of stuff from
> TV but it doesn't work very well as a general media player because MythVideo
> has (or had) no organization functionality. For example it can't group videos
> by the TV series name and such, or provide series and episode information.
MythVideo is basically a file manager. If you want to impose some sort of
organization on your media files, just do it. What MythVideo won't handle is
MULTIPLE ways of organizing your media files based on different keys and sort
of dynamic metadata searches.
I'm not sure if XBMC/Boxee has this either.
MythVideo also quite handily supports TV and Movie metadata. It's not as
slick or automated as XBMC but it's certainly there. Although it's more
accessable to simple hacks. This can easily make MythVideo a much more
usable interface.
As far as local content goes, Boxee looks "prettier" for about 5 minutes.
It's the web based stuff where MythTV really falls down. The plugins here
are either nonexistent, crude or abandoned.
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Those features may require a bit of digging to get too. That's problematic itself.
OTOH, my cinema genres are accessable even in the Browse mode because I set them up myself.
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Mythtv rocks for Tv recording, it utterly sucks for movies and videos. The really silly use of a DB for them makes it a PITA to add videos as you have to then go in and rescan.. BLAH.
Honestly the Videos, photos and music sections on MythTV needs to be ripped out and changed to something faster and better. XBMC kicks it's butt hard for those aspects.
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Actually that "silly" db makes it remarkably easy to go in and "fix things".
The problem with MythTV not being automated is a matter of MythTV not being
automated. The choice of the storage mechanism really doesn't enter into it.
They just chose to implement a cumbersome manual update process that doesn't
scale up very well.
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You can use MythVideo as a simple file manager with no DB functionality. IE, there is no need to "scan in" new files.
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What are you talking about? I'm on Linux and I think Hulu is the best of them. The only thing I don't like about it is that fullscreen is choppy on my Intel VGA chipset.
WMC plugins? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WMC plugins? (Score:5, Informative)
That having been said, I've switched over to it exclusively for my Hulu viewing. One less program running (IE) is a huge benefit on my less-than-stellar Celeron when playing full-screen video.
It does not, however, display your media library, or in any other way act like a Media Center application.
Cheers!
Re:WMC plugins? (Score:5, Informative)
Media Center Software:
Streaming Content Services:
so .. apples to apples next time?
Re:WMC plugins? (Score:4, Funny)
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The hulu site says it's optimized for WMC, but seems to indicate it is a standalone program. Does anyone have experience with it?
I used it while I was in the US. I found it didn't buffer nearly enough, and eventually gave up on it entirely. That was on a windows box with all the bandwidth a university provides.
Plex (Score:2, Interesting)
I prefer Plex over all of those. Surprised it was not included.
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No mention of local media support (Score:1)
I tend to agree that the "social" aspect of boxee is a bit in the way in the main interface, but what the reviewer didn't mention is whether zinc or hulu do anything with local media. From the zinc website it seems like it too can scan local media like boxee, what I would have liked in the review is some coverage over how well each one worked. In my experience, boxee does a really good job at this and includes a built-in interface for correcting the mistakes (aka Wrong Video link). I do agree that boxee
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Why did you convert away? Add a menu entry to mythtv that launches boxee (literally 3 lines in an xml file) and that way when boxee crashes (which it does, its alpha) you're back to mythtv, and you can still watch live tv. That's my current setup (in the midst of a painful 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 upgrade since boxee abandoned Ubuntu LTS [grr..]).
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Other than the livetv part, there isn't much to love in mythtv. Mythvideo is *horrible*. It doesn't have much in the way of automatically finding and acquiring metadata around your local media. The navigation menu assumes one big flat folder with everything in it. While it does work with directory trees, you end up having to click through that to get the video. Boxee really shines here -- it separates TV series from movies, and for tv shows, groups them according to season. This was exactly what I wan
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Actually Boxee falls down here even harder unless you are using
the Browse view in which case you are using it in the same way
that you would be using MythVideo. Separating movies from show
and then throwing them in a big pile isn't really an improvement.
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Not sure why it fails for you, but I have a fully populated Movie and TV browsing in Boxee -- I never use Browse because everything is in either Movie or TV. You may want to look at the boxee forums on media naming conventions to ensure it can classify your local media correctly.
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Yes, but MythTV NEVER crashes. It is ROCK solid (on my hardware anyhow). I love boxee for all the reasons you mentioned, but with one click of the remote, I can relaunch it from my MythTV main menu (which is the main use myth gets now :) )
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That's a very fair point on stability. Boxee certainly could use something that can restart it when it crashes; mythtv frontend makes a nice place to do that.
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Although it IS overkill for just a remote control launcher.. but I DO use it for live tv viewing and recording some OTA HD series.
MythTV (Score:3, Interesting)
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How do you use MythTV without breaking the law and without having a tuner/etc in your computer? All of these sites do that quite well.
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Well of course you have a tuner in your computer.
Or you could "break the law" I suppose and buy your own content.
That would be an interesting lawsuit. One wonders if the judge would
throw it out as soon as he saw it.
"You see your honor, we want to punish this fellow because he bought
a bunch of our stuff and didn't use it in exactly the way we wanted it."
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How do you use MythTV without breaking the law and without having a tuner/etc in your computer? All of these sites do that quite well.
For over-the-area channels, you can get an hdhomerun [silicondust.com] and stream the raw transport stream via ethernet. Plays well with MythTV. [mythtv.org]
Re:MythTV (Score:4, Insightful)
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The same goes for CD or DVD rips.
This is just stupid nonsense FUD intended to make open systems look unecessarily bad.
I suppose I could just buy all of the stuff I have on DVD as iTunes files but
I would end up paying more, would be highly restricted in terms of what devices
I can play back on and I would have a lot narrower selection of videos to choose
from.
iTunes looks cool as long as you don't pay any attention to Amazon or Tivo.
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Where did I say I had recorded anything, or that recording anything was illegal?
Reread my message again keeping in mind that those are requirements and not veiled slams on -anything-.
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Some of us *don't* care about breaking STUPID laws.
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Why settle for a bunch of DRM streaming that they will pull the run out from under you at any time. Most of the content is available to be recorded or you can rent. Either it will not have commercials or MythTV will automatically skip them. You get to pick what happens.
The big thing is: any content you want, whenever you want, free and legal. While Cable's network OnDemand feature combats this, it's less comprehensive than Hulu.
It has a large catalog of older stuff that I cannot find (or easily find) on current Cable / Fios to record. If I'm suddenly in the mood to watch a mini-marathon of "Buck Rogers," "The A-Team" or SciFi's "The Invisible Man" I can just hop onto Hulu and view it legally. If I want to rent, then I'd have to rely on Netflix (since the Blockbusters n
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All great until they no longer have it on their site or they decide that they are not making enough money and pull the plug. Then what are you going to do? Mythtv can still have it on a terabyte disk recorded legally (and you do know Mythtv can have as many tuners as you like right? half a dozen, no problem).
Fine, when they start pulling the content I care about or pull Hulu all-together then I'll worry. When things change, I'll change with them.
But MythTv still doesn't solve everything. As I said, recording isn't they best option if you want something dated or something you didn't think of recording. And renting is something a hassle, as in my case the rental places near me have very poor TV selections, and Netflix requires waiting at least 2 days.
Yes I'm aware of MythTv's abilities. But it still comes dow
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MythTV (or even Boxee) allows you to decide what remains online. For
Hulu, Buck Rogers is perhaps not the best example because it's about the
cheapest thing out there. OTOH, Alien Nation doesn't seem to be online
(the series, not the movies). So just in the first section you've got a
relatively recent series that doesn't seem to be available.
The DRM problem ultimately leads to usability issues relative to
more sophisticated playback methods. Little things like bookmarks,
ra
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Why not just have both? Aren't more options better? I have an entry in my MythTV main menu that launches boxee. See, we can all play nice. I can have the stuff I care about on local disk. I can stream what's available as its convenient. Either way it means I haven't paid a cable/satellite/content company a dime in over two years :).
For my money, its Zinc (oops, its free) (Score:2, Informative)
Screw them ALL! (Score:3, Interesting)
Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor, I'm ticked at them all. XBMC DOES, but so far I can't get it to stream Netflix OR Hulu (there are ways, but they require you to have another computer and to purchase Playon...FAIL).
Look, I'm not going to shell out hundreds of dollars just to have a media center computer. I happen to have some older hardware that is suitable for the task. PPC support makes sense because I think a fair number of people are walking the same path. So until Boxee gets off their collective butts and decides to support PPC, I'll pass.
Re:Screw them ALL! (Score:5, Interesting)
Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor
Hulu does. I'm running Hulu Desktop on a G5.
Let me summarize what you are saying (Score:1)
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Apple TV for me (Score:4, Informative)
Nice overview Rick.
For myself, I'm still finding that Apple TV and iTunes are the best combo. The new Apple TV firmware upgrade 2.4--http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/apple-tv-2-4-well-worth-the-download/--in particular has really made the Apple TV more useful than ever. Apple doesn't whisper a word of it, but the code's really been cleaned up and the result is a much more efficient media box.
The list of my problems with that combo--starting with the simple fact that it's proprietary as proprietary can be--is longer than my arm. Still, for me it's the best choice.
Steven
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I also had an idle AMD XP3200-based mobo system laying around, so I just went with that and a Ubuntu OS. The persistent advantage of AppleTV over the linux route is you get
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The Apple remote is a joke with too few buttons to be really useful or usable.
Even if I were running MacOS on my Macs I would still replace it in favor
of a less pretentious remote control.
Beyond that stupid remote, the ATV a very nice form factor. Although it is a little
underpowered. It doesn't have enough CPU or GPU to handle the larger h264 files.
Something like a popcorn hour is more future proof.
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Because there are no physical buttons on the Boxee Remote, you have to look at the handset to make every single navigational click. Then you have to look at the tv screen to verify the navigation through the interface. To preserve battery power, you have to sleep your iPhone, and when it wakes up, you have to go through the process of re-launching the Boxee remote app and i
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Hack the apple TV to run XBMC. all done.
it even plays the 720p local video files on my NAS perfectly.
Boxee front end, rtorrent backend (Score:1)
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i for one (Score:1)