Boxee Bugs — Part 1, Movies

I was a very early adopter of Boxee*, with the hopes of having easy-to-use media centers in the form of Apple TV boxes connected to each TV in the house.

Now, I of all people realize that Boxee is alpha-quality software, and as a result, I expect it to have some issues. I was not, however, prepared for the fact that using it would be a constant and unending struggle to get my media playing back properly from my SMB shares.

A little background on my setup. I have 1.5 TB of SMB-shared drives that contain all of my (legally ripped) music, movies, and TV shows. All data are in lossless formats, films are in a /Device/Film Title (File Year)/VIDEO_TS format. Permissions are properly set on the shares, and Boxee can see the shares. Most of the time. With that out of the way, here is my current movie-watching experience thus far.

1. Out of over eighty ripped films thus far, Boxee randomly picks up a whopping seven. Just seven. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to which seven Boxee will randomly pick up. Today it seems to like Batman, as it pulled up Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Gotham Knight.
2. Batman aside, Boxee incorrectly identified An Inconvenient Truth as An Inconvenient Tax. When I told Boxee that it had picked the wrong film and manually selected the proper one from a list of alternate options, the title changed to the proper title, the description of the film changed, but , but not the associated photo, which still shows up as An Inconvenient Tax.
3. The Incredibles is identified as simply “Movies”. The DVD photo is correct, but there is no description. The path is listed as, and I’m not joking here, “stack:/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../VTS_02_01.VOB”. Yes, I counted to make sure I got that right.
4. I selected Batman Begins. It started playing great, nice and smooth, until it transitioned from the first VOB to the second, whereupon the audio decided it would randomly switch to French for no good reason.
5. Finally, it likes to randomly pretend the Movies share doesn’t exist, and every fourth or fifth time I access it, it tells me nothing is found. Then it goes back to the aforementioned random seven.

This is far from ideal. A six-year-old Daewoo DVD player works better than this. Heck, Apple’s DVD player on my Macbook will successfully play a ripped, uncompressed DVD by simply pointing it at the film title on my share. All I’m looking for is the same functionality without having to build a generic MCPC at each television in my house.

*No, I don’t care that they insist on spelling it in lower case, I’m giving it a capital letter like it deserves.