D-Link made lots of geeks and early adopters happy today by introducing the Boxee Box by D-Link, winner of the CES Best of Innovations award in the Home Entertainment category.
According to D-Link, Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Internet Entertainment
Boxee is a popular PC, Mac, and Linux software program that lets users watch hundreds of thousands of popular TV shows and movies. Instead of sifting through millions of confusing websites, when users search on Boxee, TV shows and movies are delivered to them with the click of a remote control. Nearly a million Internet users around the world have already downloaded Boxee to enjoy their online entertainment.
The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same software and offers it up as a device — a companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and others. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favorite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.
In addition to video content, Boxee users can access music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and We are Hunted as well as photos from sites like flickr, Picasa, and Facebook.
Personal Entertainment
For entertainment lovers who have built their own collections of digital media stored on their computer hard drive or home network, Boxee automatically identifies their content and downloads relevant cover art, synopses, reviews, subtitles, and lyrics. This feature turns files and folders into media libraries that make it simple and appealing to navigate a collection of favorite movies, TV shows, and playlists with a simple remote.
Boxee Box by D-Link has extensive format support (see below) which ensures that when users hit the play button, they get instant gratification, with no need to download codecs or drivers. Also, with built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, it can transfer files without delay and from longer distances within a user’s home.
Social Features
The Boxee Box by D-Link keeps people connected with social features to help users discover new content from friends, experts, and tastemakers.
The first step to discovery is sharing, and Boxee makes this easy by letting people recommend any playing content to friends. Additionally Boxee automatically uses recommendations from a user’s Twitter and Facebook friends so they can find new content and instantly enjoy it on the big screen. Because anyone can build on top of Boxee’s open App platform, users can craft their own truly custom experience by creating or downloading plug-ins, add-ons, and games.
The Boxee Box by D-Link is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2010 through the company’s vast network of retail and e-tail outlets, and at D-Link’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com.
Supported Codecs & Formats
Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats, including:
Video:
Adobe Flash 10.1
H.264 (MKV, MOV)
VC-1
WMV
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
AVI
Xvid
Divx
PCM/LPCM
VOB
Audio:
MP3
WMA
WAV
AIFF
FLAC
AAC
DTS
Dolby Digital
Ogg Vorbis
PHOTO:
JPEG
TIFF
BMP
PNG
