Worlds Colliding Violently » boxee

Boxee Bugs, Redux

Mike — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:50:50 +0000

Not too long ago, I wrote about some problems I was having with trying to watch my collection of DVDs which were ripped onto my hard drives. I wrote about how Boxee didn’t replicate the features I was expecting to find in a DVD player, and how it wasn’t really worth it.

Well, I take it all back.

Sort of.

I was tipped off in the Boxee forums the other day that for some inexplicable reason, Boxee doesn’t play VIDEO_TS folder rips properly, but, if you simply convert those folders into individual ISOs, then suddenly, all will be right with the world.

It seemed silly and rather ridiculous, I mean, why on earth would that be the case? But figuring there could be no harm in trying, I grabbed a copy of ImgTool Classic, picked out my rip of The Shawshank Redemption, and gave it a whirl. A few minutes later, I had a shiny 8 gig ISO sitting on my drive. I made a share for it, went upstairs, and opened up my Movies list on Boxee.

It recognized it, so that was a good start. I hit play, and lo and behold, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like I was using a completely different piece of software. All the Boxee menus changed, I could suddenly access DVD menus and properly set my audio preferences for the entire film, not just for individual VOBs. Subtitles come on or stay off at my request, not whenever they damn well feel like it. It displays the length of the entire film, not just 25 minute VOB intervals. Chapters even work!

Now, mind you, it’s not perfect. There are one or two small bugs. Changing subtitles during playback is clunky at best, the menu covers 3/4 of the screen, so you can’t discreetly turn them on or off. Speaking of which, the main option for subtitles (the one not in the settings window) takes you to open subtitles, where it attempts to download a set. Why? Why not use the DVD-included titles first? Skipping around is a bit buggy too, sometimes it will display video in slow motion before catching it up, but that could just be a result of the slightly underpowered ATV hardware. And the DVD recognition could use some tweaking too; 12 Monkeys came back as Disney’s 1967 feature, Monkeys Go Home, and despite correcting it, An Inconvenient Truth returns as both that and An Inconvenient Tax, both of which point to the same ISO. Very odd.

So now, the only issue I really have is actually a question. Why? Why on earth would Boxee handle a VIDEO_TS folder differently from an ISO? They’re the exact same contents, Boxee figures out which VOBs to play in which order, so why can’t it just do the same thing for both? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I’m happy to have found a solution, but I shouldn’t need to.

In the meantime, however, I am rapidly encoding all of my VIDEO_TS folders to ISOs, and I’m delighted to say that I am now just a short step away from my goal of having all of my DVD collection available on demand in any television in the house.

Boxee Bugs — Part 1, Movies

Mike — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:26:25 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Well, it’s official.

Mike — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:51:50 +0000

Hulu and boxee are splitting up.

You know, it’s really quite depressing when you see utter stupidity, know it’s utter stupidity, but can’t do anything to change it. Boxee did nothing except show Hulu in a nicer format. The ads were still there, so it’s not as though Hulu was losing their revenue stream. Instead, they were gaining over 100,000 active streams from Boxee users, and the ad impressions that go along with that.

Sadly, the old media in charge of the content that Hulu shows decided that watching their content on a nice TV with a remote control was simply wrong, and that it had to be stopped.

This isn’t the first time that the studios have looked at a good piece of tech and then turned around and shot themselves in the foot trying to ignore it, and it certainly won’t be the last. But as an ardent lover of boxee, I for one won’t be touching Hulu until the situation is resolved. And if it’s not resolved, then I won’t be using it ever again. This is less of a sacrifice than it sounds, because without boxee, I wouldn’t watch Hulu at all.