Fredstuff.com

Yes, I am the proud owner of a TV again. It was a delayed birthday gift from my mom, hi mom! It’s one of the latest Philips, 42″ LCD TV’s and I’m currently enjoying a complete trial package from the cable provider. God knows how many channels I have at the moment. I’ve been without a TV set for a few years since I gave my last TV to a friend. I live in a bigger apartment now and crouching in front of my (still great) 21″ widescreen computer monitor watching stuff is a bit limiting, to say the least. It worked out great in my previous apartment though. I sat through about 1.000.000 pages on forums before going with the Philips, modern TV devices are new to me and I wanted to know as much as possible before choosing what make and model to go for. I was a bit worried about the blacks and the fact that it’s not 100MHz but the TV is great with pretty deep blacks and the lack of 100MHz is not noticable, at least not to me. I’ve bought a mini displayport to HDMI cable to connect the Macbook to the TV to view content and the TV actually accepts external hard drives through USB (movies, music and pictures), it works pretty well but what I really want is the Boxee Box.

I’ve been running Boxee on my mac for a while now and I love it. Boxee is a software media player that also incorporates a lot of content from the net. There are several alternatives to Boxee, XBMC and Plex (mac only). They are nice but I really like Boxee. All of the media players/streamers are capable of playing video without unpacking the archived files in your downloads folder — saves a lot of time. Boxee is currently in league with D-Link to produce a physical, real box that hooks up to your TV and it will ship with this awesome RF-remote.

The RF part (Radio Frequency) means that you can use the remote without pointing it at the TV and this fact makes it easier and more comfortable to use the QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote. The Boxee interface is really good too.

It feels snappy and navigating is a breeze, even through my iPhone running the Boxee Remote app. The Boxee Box is expected to be released Q2 2010 and I cant wait. Expected retail price is $200 and that’s on par with the Xtreamer, a competitor with a huge following. So, Boxee, get this device on the shelves or I’m giving my money to your enemy!