If you are looking for a decent media player to plug into your network wired or wirelessly then I would recommend the Boxee D-Link. In my opinion there are two kinds of Media Players out there, the dumb and the smart kind. The dumb is usually the type that just plays what ever you point it too or what ever USB you plug into it. A smart player is the on that gets information for you, tracks your history, gets all the information of TV Shows & Movies with the backgrounds and images to make for a very nice user interface. You can build your own smart player like XBMC or Plex Media Server but in both cases it would require some work and finese to put together a system like that but a lot of people don’t have the patience or know how to make something like this and this case I would recommend the Boxee Media Player because it does about 80% of the smart actions without the difficulty of configuring every little detail of the device.

Pros:

• Lots of Updates for it, and its been around long enough to have fixed most of its kinks
• Very simple and clean interface
• Recognized about 90% of the TV Shows that I have, and 9%5 of the Movies
• Plug & Play no difficulty setting it up
• Scans materials and updates your shows when you add new episodes every few hours
• Keeps track of shows that you have watched and those that you haven’t, and if you are half way through a show you can play where you stopped
• The remote is simple on one side and has a qwerty keyboard on the other, very useful for when you browse online
• Works very well over a wireless network, and in my case the accesspoint is a far from it so I’m impressed with its wireless capabilites
• You can use an iPhone or iPad to control it

Cons:

• Its a bit too dumb on certain parts, I keep having to enter my storage server password everyday which gets annoying, they should give the option to remember
• If you leave it on all day you have to restart it when you use it because it hangs a bit but overall it doesn’t have a negative effect

Overall:

Honestly, Boxee got off on the wrong foot when they first started in 2010 but the hardware is great. The box is small and silent, the RF remote is fantastic, and the hardware overall is a good value over buying an ATOM/ION nettop and IR remote, and installing Boxee or XBMC. I still think this is a geeky product that is trying to be usable for non-geeks which is a step in the right direction.

Price: $179
Link: Amazon
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