Archive:Boxee Box

Devices

x86 hardware

Boxee Box

Boxee box ports

Boxee Box from D-Link is a Linux-based media player set-top-box, and while the company behind the Boxee software might be long dead, the community has finally hacked the Boxee Box to run a port of XBMC that is currently being improved on by independent developers, breathing new life into the still very decent hardware.

This wiki page is a collection of links, information, tips, and guides related to running XBMC on that Boxee Box hardware from D-Link. Please note that Team-XBMC does not "officially" support XBMC on the Boxee Box and does therefor not directly provide any binaries for it. Not yet, at least.

Overview

Boxee Box by D-Link is a Linux based media player powered by Intel Atom CE4100 SoC (System-on-a-Chip), codename: Sodaville, with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500 (based on the PowerVR SGX535 OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU from Imagination Technologies), that is from what is referred to as "Intel CE" or " Intel CEx" series of x86 media processors designed for consumer electronics, which all feature advanced integrated "Intel Precision View Technology" display processors. Boxee Box first became available on the market bck in 2010, and the Boxee Box remote that comes with it is a dual-sided RF remote / QWERTY keyboard that probably inspired the design many of the other dual-sided air-mouse remotes that are available today.

The hardware box features many of the ports and connectors that are available on most Android media players today, namely an HDMI 1.3a port with CEC support, an optical SP/DIF for digital audio out, a stereo RCA analog audio out, RJ-45 GigaBit Ethernet port, and 802.11n Wi-Fi, two USB 2.0 ports, and an SD card slot. And its Intel Atom CE4100 SoC have dedicated integrated circuits for hardware acceleration video and image decoding of JPEG, MPEG-2 (MP@HL/MP@ML profiles), VC1/WM9 (AP@L1-L3 profiles), MPEG-4.2 ASP, and H.264 (MPEG-4.2 AVC [email protected] profiles), with display processor capable of chroma up-sampling scaling, temporal noise reduction, de-interlacing, and output to 1080p@24 fps film format, as well as 1080p@50 and 1080p@60 fps with deep color in RGB/YUV. The integrated 24-bit 192KHz audio DSP (Digital Signal Processor) capable of hardware acceleration of DD/AC3, DD+, Dolby True HD, DTS, DTS-HD, MP3, WMA9, and AAC plus V2. Dedicated Transport Processor as security processor for hardware accelerated decryption of DES, 3DES, AES, MULTI2, and DVB-CSA transport stream descrambling.

Most people was however disappointed with the initial firmware of the Boxee Box at launch time, and even if subsequent firmware updates did greatly improved the user experience, many considered the effort of porting XBMC to the device early on, but due to NDK agreements with application makers like Netflix the Boxee Box shipped as a closed product and it is not until recently it has been made easy to hack.

Builds

Unofficial Builds

XBMC 13 builds for Boxee Box: http://www.devil-strike.com/xbmc_boxee/index.php or http://boxeed.in/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=148

Installing XBMC

Gaining root access and installing XBMC on the Boxee box is today a relatively simple process and should not take longer than 15-30 minutes. All that you will need is a USB memory stick (external USB-harddrive will work as well) or an SD card. High speed USB memory stick is recommended over SD card as they help improve the performance of XBMC, (so if you insist on using a SD card then please consider to using a Class 10 model or faster).

Install Boxee+Hacks to gain root access

The first thing you will have to do is to gain root access o the Boxee Box, and to do that follow these steps to install "Boxee+Hacks" which does exactly that.

1. Download install.zip (Boxee+Hacks) from http://boxeed.in/ (use Boxee Hacks version 1.5.3+ or later) installion package and unzipping it somewhere on your harddrive
2. Format a USB flash drive or SD card to FAT32 using the label BOXEE (noting that "BOXEE" is case sensitive so be sure to only use capital letters)
3. Copy the contents of the 'install' folder with the files from the zip files that you downloaded earlier to the USB memory stick or SD card
4. Plug it into the device, and boot Boxee Box
5. In the menu of Boxee Box original software go into ‘Settings’->’Network’->’Servers’ to enable ‘Windows File Sharing’
6. Add ‘;sh /media/BOXEE/install.sh‘ to your ‘Host Name’. Make sure it looks like ‘boxeebox;sh /media/BOXEE/install.sh‘ after you are done.
7. Reboot the device to start the install process.
8. Once it is complete you will have a device with root access.

Running XBMC on Boxee Box

There are two ways to get XBMC for Boxee Box. The first is compiling a build yourself XBMC from source using code by following the instructions available on https://github.com/quarnster/boxeebox-xbmc, or much simpler, download the latest pre-compiled version from http://www.devil-strike.com/xbmc_boxee/index.php

Once you finished building it or downloading the zip file, extract the files to the root of a storage device (USB flash drive or SD card) making sure xbmc.bin is in the root folder, insert the storage device in Boxee Box, power the device, and it should automatically boot into XBMC.

If you want to go back to Boxee original software just remove USB-memory/USB-disk/SD-card and reboot the Boxee Box. Once you remove the storage device, it will just load the "Boxee+Hacks" that you have installed previously, booting the original Boxee Box software.

FAQ

• http://boxeed.in/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=116

Known issues

• It recommended to do a clean install of XBMC (remove all files) if you have a previous version of XBMC installed.
• For now is recommended to always remove all files from USB-memory/USB-disk/SD-card when updating to a later version of XBMC.
• You might need to reboot the Boxee Box to make changes in XBMC settings and configurations take effect.
• TrueHD and DTS-HD are not working yet (while DD/AC3 and DTS inside TrueHD and DTS-HD respectively works fine).
• Some users have some sort of audio-drops when enable HDMI or SP/DIF pass-through.
• When XBMC starts you mght get following error: "Failed to start common cache", this is a knows issue, try rebooting.

Random notes

Feel free to place various notes, tips, and links here. As this section of the wiki gets more organized, those notes will be properly sorted. Consider this like a dumping ground for when you're not sure where to put something.

• If you like the look and feel of the original Boxee software but you want all the bells and whistles of XBMC then you might also want to tryout a Boxee style skin for XBMC called Boxee Inspirat, checkout it out at http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=124222
• Myles McNamara have written good instructions on how to install XBMC on Boxee Box D-Link which also include some back-story http://smyl.es/how-to-obtain-root-install-and-run-xbmc-on-d-link-boxee-box/
• The original Boxee+Hacks repository and website/forums was previously https://github.com/boxeehacks/boxeehack and http://boxeeplus.com

Development

If you want to help develop XBMC for Boxee Box then you can get the source code here on GitHub

• https://github.com/quarnster/boxeebox-xbmc

Instructions for compiling XBMC for Boxee Box can be found here

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/quarnster/boxeebox-xbmc/master/docs/README.boxeebox

Code repository of Boxee+Hacks for rooting access hack and other tools can be found here

• https://github.com/cigamit/boxeehack (further discussion can be found at http://boxeed.in )

See also

• Boxee Box remote

Other links

• http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=192310 XBMC.org forum thread about XBMC for Boxee Box.
• http://boxeed.in
  • http://boxeed.in/forums/viewforum.php?f=13