Boxee Versus Plex

Media convergence is destined to be the next “big thing,” and there are no shortage of solutions to turn your computer into a full-featured home entertainment system. Microsoft has had “Media Center” available for quite some time now, but for those of us who are Mac-obsessed, there are four options: Front Row, built into MacOS and AppleTV; XBMC; Boxee; and Plex. For this article, I’ve concentrated on Boxee and Plex because those are the two I’ve been playing with lately.

Boxee and Plex are both based upon XBMC and have very similar behaviors as a result. The look and feel of the two are radically different, however. Boxee leans more toward organic, social networking that revolves around your video watching and Plex is more geared for media organization and low-level tweakability.

Social Networking
Social networking is Boxee’s strong suit. You can befriend others and see their media viewing activities. Perhaps the most interesting feature is the ability to recommend something you’re watching and have it appear in the “recommendations” section of your friends’ home screen (shown above). There’s a huge downside, however: you can’t add, edit, or view your friends from within the application… everything except recommending items has to be done on the website.

That said, I never felt the need to use the social networking aspects of Boxee, so it was a throw-away feature for me.

User Interface
Plex is the clear user interface winner. The default skin is absolutely beautiful and the motion between menu elements is smooth and elegant. Plex’s interface is more complicated than Boxee’s, but once you’ve gotten accustomed to what each menu item is for, the organization is natural and intuitive.

One of the most impressive Plex features for me was Plex’s ability to automatically download media fan art and, in the case of TV shows, theme music. This created a fabulous, immersive experience as I navigated from movie to movie or TV show to TV show. Seemingly small touches like this really made the difference for me with regard to user experience.

Media Playback
Both Boxee and Plex did a fine job of playing back various media, including 1080p high-definition content. Plex has an edge with regard to tweaking your playback settings, however.

There are numerous items within my library that, for various reasons, have slight audio/video synchronization issues. Boxee plays these items fine, but Plex makes resyncing the audio with the video a snap. You can easily adjust the audio lead or lag time while the video is playing. If you’ve ever been watching something and really, really wished you could just easily tweak the audio to match the video, now you can, and you don’t even have to get up from the couch to do it.

Library Organization
Both Boxee and Plex have strong media organization abilities. They both, for instance, will separate your movies from your TV shows. Neither read the in-file metadata, though, so if you’ve been very careful about tagging your movies as movies and your TV shows as TV shows, it won’t matter much… both Boxee and Plex ignore them and attempt to guess the media title and other information from the filename.

Boxee seems to guess incorrectly more often than Plex, though. I’m not sure if that’s due to the source of their data or if Plex’s filename parsing routines are better, but it gets annoying when you have to go back and correct a ton of stuff in your library.

Remote Control
You can control both Boxee and Plex via your Apple Remote, but Plex kicks open the door to a whole slew of additional possibilities.

The Apple remote only has six buttons and Boxee only recognizes those six. This means your navigation options are limited to the basic up, down, left, right, play/pause, and menu.

Plex, on the other hand, has a setting to use a Harmony Remote. This allows you a ton of additional options, such as a stop button, different buttons for skip and seek, plus custom menu options. Plex makes all of this very easy: just install the Plex profile on your Harmony and tell Plex that’s what you’re using.

My only criticism on this front is of both Boxee and Plex: they suffer from remote lag, although Plex seems to suffer from it slightly less than Boxee. When using Front Row, the remote is very smooth and responsive. If I click a direction key, the menu immediately moves in that direction. When using either Boxee or Plex, however, the remote is sluggish and it sometimes takes a couple of presses to get a response from the application. I’m not sure if this is an XBMC problem that has been inherited downward or something with how Apple’s remote API works.

Online Media
This is a tossup. Both Plex and Boxee support add-ins that extend the reach of the platform. Plex currently supports Hulu, but considering the Hulu-Boxee war going on right now, that may not last. The one feature in Boxee that I do miss in Plex is the ability to stream Netflix videos.

Plex’s API for add-ins seems more open to me, but I haven’t written anything for either platform.

Conclusions
For my purposes, Plex is the clear winner. If you really want to do social networking that revolves around your media watching habits, Boxee’s the only choice. If you are a theater nut and want more control of your media, it’s hard to beat the ease and power of Plex.

	Boxee	Plex
Pros	Social networking More likely to have agreements with major studios	Superior control of your media playback experience Media recognition is more intelligent User interface is elegant
Cons	User interface is a bit barren Media recognition is very, very wrong on occasion	More complex Media organization is a bit harder to understand Doesn’t stream Netflix