After about a week with this new TV exclusively on Boxee, I miss the grand polish and simplicity of Apple TV. The YouTube Leanback app on Boxee was driving me absolutely nuts and the flakiness/inconsistency of the other apps made me want to throw it out the window. Its saving grace was the Crunchyroll, Navi-X, and fitness channel apps.
The Apple TV has limited channel sources so far but what little it carries, it presents them very well and very intuitively. AirPlay is a big bonus and if iOS 4.3 allows Crunchyroll videos from iPhone/iPad to stream to Apple TV then the Boxee looks even worse. Don’t get me started on the fact that Netflix support is STILL absent on Boxee. On Apple TV it’s a cinch to use!
I have to keep reminding myself that Boxee’s killer feature is its ability to stream local LAN content of nearly any type (AVI, WMV, RVMB, MKV+subtitles, MP4, etc) from any sort of UPnP or SMB share –in my case, $200 whitebox PC running FreeNAS.
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