Boxee vs. WDTV Live
So I was at Costco the other day and I saw a Western Digital WDTV Live box for $109. It is a media player that hooks up to various connections (LAN, USB, Streaming) and presents the media in a nice 1080P display. I figured that I would pit it against Boxee and also test it for a project at work that called for an IPTV solution that could handle flash video. Since the WDTV also played YouTube videos I figured it could do FLV without an issue.
Flash forward a couple of days and here is my finding:
Boxee is by -FAR- superior.
File Management
The WDTV Live gives you three ways to display your content: Thumbnail, List and Preview. The Preview mode is nice, but you have no option of starting the video it auto-previews. This is a problem because of what type of content you might have. Funny or questionable clips mixed in with Kids videos are a no-no. Additionally there are no sorting options in any of the modes and the scroll function is seriously lacking.
There is an option in the player to only select certain sources for your files, but no matter how many times I went through the UI to select specific folders to search, it ended up cataloging the entire system anyway. That means that on the USB drive I connected I ended up getting 16,000 pictures of my kids and 1,500 movies – of which I only wanted a small subset.
GUI
The UI is actually fairly pleasant and reminds me of the Moxie client that I had seen a year or so ago with the Charter cable service DVR package. The display reaches the entire 1920×1080 of the TV and the color depth is impressive. Unfortunately for the GUI, the options that it presents to the user are far from appealing. They should have included an advanced mode to allow more granular control of the system.
Video/Audio
The video output for USB connected devices is actually fairly presentable. The FFW/RWD buttons don’t do much and movies that include chapter markers usually don’t work properly. The USB device rarely stuttered and on the 2-pass high bitrate H264 encoded videos it was almost as good as the real deal. The audio on the movies was decent, but there was no additional volume control added to the system. Boxee allows you to actually control additional gain to the movies audio to give it a bit of a -boost- if your PC audio card just can’t handle the truth. For those of us that don’t use an amp, this feature is key for movies that were encoded without AGC.
Streaming
The WDTV Live streams audio natively from Pandora and Live365. Since I don’t have a Live365 account, I loaded up my Pandora profile and was pleased with both the interface and the response time. Album art and song information was immediately presented in a nice format and my listing was presented in a fairly simple manner. Streaming from a network device, however, was a different matter.
Since the WDTV has no support for wireless networking, it seems to be a no-brainer that all of the latency and connection issues with streaming over 802.11 goes away when you are hard wired ….. hah! I experienced nothing but stutter and sync issues with streaming from my NAS device, while Boxee had no problems at all (or other media players like the PS3 for that matter).
Hacking
Fortunately for the WDTV Live, there is an active hacking community which adds features to official firmware releases. The WDLXTV package that I picked up was amazingly simple to install (load to a thumb drive and plug it in), didn’t change the core functionality of the WDTV firmware at all and provided a nice toolbox of options to keep on the unit. With the hacked firmware you get things like:
- HTTP server, SSH client, FTP
- NTFS-3G support
- USB-Wifi card support
- Bittorrent client (deluge!)
- External DVD drive support\
- And a TON more.
Overall
Even with the hacked firmware, the unit has significant limitations for sorting your media selectively so that you can present folders of folders. For instance, I might want to have videos of my kids listed, however I don’t want to either have to browse the file tree or scroll through 10000 videos to find Kung Fu Panda. There should be better ways to organize your files. While Boxee has limitations around this as well, there are more granular controls around what get searched and how. Boxee is also smart enough to try and pull cover art for the videos instead of giving me screen captures or generic thumbnail images.
In the end, the lack of inclusion of other HD feeds like Hulu, CBS/Fox…etc is a serious detracting factor for the WDTV Live. Perhaps later when the firmware becomes more advanced or the hacking community becomes more brazen with their updates this might be a viable box. Until then, it is a non-flash supporting mini box with some cool potential.
I will stick with my Boxee and wait for the BoxeeBox.
FYI – WDTV happens to support a PlayOn Media Server.
Thanks a nice comparison. Thank you for that.
I have been waiting on Boxee Box since long and one thing which I am not sure of is, if it supports FTP for accessing the harddisk it connects to over the network and if torrent client could be installed.
Wish someone brings all to a single box
Thanks for the detailed comparison… I’m contemplating both right now and your review has helped point me in the right direction. Considering that the Boxee Box is now out, I think it’s a clear winner. Thanks again…
Keep using Boxee if you don’t mind giving up all of your privacy. I’ll stick with XBMC or WDTV.
I just bought a WD LIVE TV Plus yesterday and the test between the two was done in March last year. Is it anyone who did the test with the last models, otherwise I’m about to get the BOXee instead.
Thanks