Frequently Asked Questions

General Boxee Questions:

1. What is Boxee?
Boxee is the best way to watch movies, TV shows and clips from the Internet or your hard drive on your TV. You can buy a device powered by Boxee.

2. What can I watch on my Boxee?
If it’s available on the Internet, then you can probably watch it on your Boxee - there are more than 40,000 TV show episodes and movies* currently available through Boxee. Plus, you can play personal stuff from your network or hard-drive, and use the Boxee Browser to watch video from your favorite websites.
*varies by region

3. How do I watch live TV?
It depends on what you want to watch. Some Boxee applications like BBC or MLB broadcast live content. However, most content from mainstream TV makes it way into our TV Show library soon after it airs. You can also purchase Boxee Live TV to add local broadcast stations to Boxee.

4. Why does Boxee require a login?
Boxee is meant to be social - not just with friends online, but also with people in your house. With this in mind we designed Boxee with multiple user accounts so that your social network, favorite TV shows and apps remain personalized and accessible only to you. If you want Boxee to log in to your account automatically when it starts up, make sure there are no other user accounts added to your Boxee and select "remember password" from the login screen.

5. I can't remember my password, how can I fetch a new one?
Use our Password Recovery tool.

Boxee for TVs and huge monitors:

6. How much does Boxee cost?
Boxee-powered devices start at around $180. There’s no monthly fee to use Boxee, although some premium applications do have a subscription or pay-per-view fee.

7. What is the Boxee Box by D-Link?
It's the first major device powered by Boxee on the market. It’s an all-in-one box specialized to run Boxee and it comes with a useful QWERTY remote. Read more here.

8. How does Boxee stack up against the competition?

Compared to Apple TV
There's more to life than iTunes
iTunes is great, but there is a whole world of video on the Internet that you may want on your TV. Live sports games, web shows, live concerts and more. If you can watch it on the web, you can watch it on your TV with Boxee.

Our HD is twice their HD
The Boxee Box by D-Link has more than double the resolution of the Apple TV so you'll get full HD (1080p), making every inch of that HDTV worth it.

Boxee plays most file formats
While AppleTV is tailored to stuff you can play on your iPod, the Boxee Box can play almost anything that you can play on a computer - including every popular video, music, or photo format so you can click play with confidence.

Compared to Google TV
Internet TV Should Not Just Be The Internet on Your TV
Boxee has been working with some of the best Internet companies to deliver an experience that's tailored to your TV: Pandora, MLB, FunnyOrDie, NHL, Flickr and hundreds more so it looks great on your TV and is fun to use, rather than asking you to navigate web pages on your TV.

No keyboards on your coffee table
We believe that TV should feel like TV all the way down to the remote in your hand. Using a computer keyboard in the living room is like using a microwave in your car - it might be handy, but it just doesn't fit.

Compared to Roku
Get More Than Apps
Roku currently pushes all their content through 75 apps. The Boxee Box has over 400... plus a TV Show Library of 40k episodes... plus a Movie Library with thousands of top movies... plus a full web browser... plus a small QWERTY remote to easily find it all. All those pluses add up to way more than two hundred bucks, but that’s all we’re going to charge you for them.

Play All Your Stuff
While Roku can playback a few types of files from a USB drive, the Boxee Box can play almost anything that you can play on a computer - including every popular format. The Boxee Box supports playback from your home network, a USB drive, or an SD card (from your camera) so you can click play with confidence without ever having to leave the couch.

9. What options do I have for a remote control?
Buy a Boxee device, and the remote is included. There’s also an Official iOS app and a Android apps that will allow you to lean back and take control of Boxee on your Android Phone, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

Boxee for iPad

10. Does Boxee for iPad work on iPad 1 and iPad 2?
Yes! Anyone with an iPad can use Boxee for iPad.

11. Do I need a Boxee Device to use Boxee for iPad?
No. Boxee for iPad will work for anyone, whether you've used Boxee or not. If you own a Boxee Box, the iPad app will allow you to send videos from your iPad to your TV which we think is pretty cool.

12. Will Boxee for iPad work with the Boxee Box / Iomega TV?
Boxee for iPad can be used alone or in conjunction with any Boxee device.

13. What is the Boxee Media Manager?
The Boxee Media Manager enables you to stream all of the media that is available on computers or storage devices in your home network to your iPad. It runs on Mac OS X 10.5+ and Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

14. Can the Boxee Media Manager play Videos, Music and photos?
Currently the Boxee Media Manager only plays back video files.

15. Do I need the Boxee Media Manager on each machine that has video files?
Yes. You need to install the Boxee Media Manager on each computer with video files you would like to stream to your iPad,

Technical Questions

16. How do I know that an application or TV show is not playing because it's geo-blocked, and not because of some other problem with Boxee?
Some content providers block access to their content from outside their region due to distribution agreements in different parts of the world.

The easiest way to know which is which is to visit to the original content provider's website and try to play the media directly from there. If it works on their website, it should also work in Boxee. If it won't play on their website, then Boxee won't play it either.

17. How do I upgrade Boxee?
You will be prompted to upgrade when a new version is available whenever you login.

18. Which video formats can Boxee play?
Boxee supports Adobe Flash 10.1, FLV/On2 VP6 (FLV/FV4/M4V), H.264 AVC (TS/AVI/MKV/MOV/M2TS/MP4), VC-1 (TS/AVI/MKV/WMV), MPEG-1 (DAT/MPG/MPEG), MPEG-2 (MPG/MPEG/VOB/TS/TP/ISO/IFO), MPEG-4 (MP4/AVI/MOV), DivX 3/4/5/6 (AVI/MKV), Xvid (AVI/MKV), and WMV9 (WMV/ASF/DVR-MS).

19. Which audio formats can Boxee play?
Boxee supports MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AIF/AIFF, AC3/AAC, OGG, FLAC, DTS, and Dolby Digital/Dolby True HD

20. Which image formats can Boxee display?
Boxee supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF.

21. What if I have a question not covered here?
If you want to report a bug, ask us a question or even suggest an improvement, then you should visit us at Boxee Support. There you’ll find our Getting Started and Troubleshooting guides.