It has been 2 weeks since the first users got their Boxee Boxes. We received many bug reports, complaints, praises, feature suggestions, etc.

Today we are releasing the first firmware update with numerous bug fixes and improvements (details below). The Boxee Box is automatically checking for an update every 24hrs, but you can manually initiate the update by going to Settings>System>Update and click Check for New Version of Boxee. The build # is 1.0.1.16319. (in case for whatever reason the Box does not download the new version you can install it manually by following the instructions here)

At the risk of sounding emotional and corny, I must say a big Thank You! to the early users of the Boxee Box. You have been amazing. Providing great feedback. Telling us we suck in some cases and that we rock in others. Helping us troubleshoot. With this first firmware upgrade we hope we’re demonstrating that we are not only listening, but also taking action.

We are now working on the next version of the firmware. More bug fixes prioritized based on your reporting and a first batch of usability/UI fixes (will share screenshots and issues being addressed later next week). We aim to release a couple more firmware upgrades till the end of the year. Including not just fixes, but also the addition of the much anticipated new Netflix and Vudu apps.

Bug Fixes and Improvements:

Media Playback

• 1080i playback in Web browser caused black screens for Web and local content
• Some HD .avi content playing at low frames-per-second
• Failure to seek in specific Blu-Ray .iso over a network share
• Case sensitivity issues in .iso filename extension
• Stuttering while playing some Blu-Ray content
• No video, audio only while playing some .m4v content
• Failure to render .ass subtitles after changing overscan settings
• Failure in opening .rar files containing subtitles
• Playback and overscan issues when switching to and from fullscreen of online content
• Rear channels on AAC 5.1 are not played properly w/ LPCM 5.1 out
• Flash video audio drops out after ~1 hour in certain online videos
• Select subtitles from hard-drive, screen does not work
• MPEG1 video inconsistent play
• Re-buffering during playback of HD-Audio
• Video stuttering and losing audio (white noise) when resuming playback on a specific title in a blu-ray folder/ iso file
• HGTV OSD Controls don’t work and counter stuck at 00:00
• MPEG4 movies occasionally have green line at the side and/or purple line at the button

Wireless Connectivity

• Wireless signal levels display (showing one bar when in fact 3 bars should be displayed)
• Some WiFi encryption schemes were not supported
• First time WiFi setup takes excessive time
• Boxee does not accept ‘$’ in passwords for WiFi
• Wrong message displayed when WiFi password is wrong

Network Shares

• Repeated credentials request for non-secure network shares (SMB)
• Unable to access network share when Window Live is installed on Windows 7
• Intermittent crashes when failing to open networked media
• Frequent disconnects from Mac OS X network shares (SMB)
• Not reconnecting to disconnected shares disables selection in the Movies database view
• Prompted for username/password when accessing different shared folders on same computer via SMB

Other

• Empty screen appears when filtering shows by Channels > TED, Engadget, when geo lock is enabled
• Faulty DNS configuration when using VPN causing a Boxee network disconnect
• Not returning to the selected item library screens after item selection
• Leave/stay prompt shows up multiple times for some online content
• Searching for applications with spaces in their titles (i.e. funny or die) doesn’t show the application in the results
• When creating a new user, username textbox is not visible when the email contains the word ‘boxee’
• Repositories screen buttons activation and adding toggle state is wrong
• Web browser screen size was wrong, not compensating for overscan
• “Resume from” does not always show
• Browser Loading progress bar does not go away
• Weather location and timezone are not always set up correctly
• Boxee weather application doesn’t use the Temperature Scale configured at Settings > General > Location
• sian fonts display in the browser
• ‘Friends feed’ from Facebook is not ordered correctly
• TV OSD does not always work
• Browser Loading progress bar does not go away in certain cases

Improvements and additions

• Support .mkv with header compression
• Support switching from PC black level to video black level
• Default overscan is now 3% on all borders
• Add a global subtitles toggle, set to off by default
• Support for showing the last letter typed in password fields
• Support local thumbnails: .tbn support / folder.jpg
• Enable external subtitles for Blu-Ray and DVD iso/folders
• User selectable slideshow for the screensaver

This weekend only, November 20 – 21, MUBI, the on demand movie service for independent, international and classic films, will stream the film festival hit Revolución to Boxee users around the globe for free.

One of the rare films to play at the Berlin, Cannes, and New York Film festivals, Revolución was made in honor of the 100th anniversary of Mexican revolution. The project was masterminded by the ten hottest young Mexican directors, from the established (art house master Carlos Reygadas) to the buzzed about and up-and-coming (Amat Escalante and Gerardo Naranjo), to international superstar Gael García Bernal, who shares directorial credit with his Y tu mamá también co-star, Diego Luna.

Nov. 20th also coincides with the film’s simultaneous release in theaters and on DVD, and the online premiere represents the impressive ability of MUBI to deliver an exciting new film to fans worldwide, exclusively and for free, all at once .  We’re honored to be able to share this visionary film and innovative release with our users around the globe thanks to MUBI (look for it in the featured section this weekend).

The Mexican revolution began one hundred years ago with the overthrow of the country’s dictatorial President Porfirio Díaz. In Revolución, ten directors look back sat the violent upheaval that was to bring dramatic changes to the country.  Enjoy the rich cinematography, impressive storytelling, and cultural reflections on their own heritage of these young visionaries this weekend for free on MUBI.

Today. November 16 at 2pm EST (New York time), I’ll be hosting a Q&A session on Livestream.

If you are an existing Boxee Box user or considering getting one, it is an opportunity for you to ask me any question you may have. The Q&A session will be 1hr long or more (depends how it goes and whether I will be able to fight the urge to go downstairs for a macchiato from the Van Leeuwen truck).

We will be embedding the Livestream on the blog - http://blog.boxee.tv/

You can also watch it here - http://livestre.am/t7hA

I hope you can tune in – if you’d like to ask me a question, send it to me via @boxee on Twitter and I’ll do my best to answer as many of your queries as possible.

The Boxee Box by D-Link is launching today in 33 countries with a brand new version of the software. You can order yours here.

If you have been spending more and more time watching videos on your computer and would like to be able to watch the same stuff on your TV screen, we think the Boxee Box is the best way to do it.

Here is why:

Tons of Movies and TV Shows, Netflix, VUDU and Hulu Plus

There is a whole generation out there for whom Movies and TV shows are synonymous with Netflix and Hulu. We have some good news for these users.

If you’re like us, you are a Netflix member instantly watching unlimited TV episodes & movies, and you want to rent new titles from a service like VUDU. It’s a killer combo and both will work great for you on Boxee.

Yes. We’re planning to bring Netflix to the Boxee Box before the end of the year.

We are also working with Hulu to bring Hulu Plus to the Boxee Box. We are very excited about the opportunity to work together to provide a Hulu experience that is optimized for the TV and the Boxee Box. We think you will love it!

This in addition to the thousands of movies and shows you can already access on Boxee. From services such as MUBI, OpenFilm, IndieMoviesOnline, and EZTakes.

Full HD all the way

You bought a TV that supports True HD and maybe even set up a surround system. Boxee can put them both into great use. Boxee plays videos in 1080p at 60fps without breaking a sweat and it will pass through 5.1 and 7.1 audio to your receiver.

The Internet has lots of 1080p videos (even YouTube), your new digital camera may also be able to produce 1080p videos. There is no reason to settle for 720p.

We eat codecs

The world of digital video is a gory mess. There are numerous codecs, video formats, audio formats, subtitle standards and people to mix them all together. The result is that your hard drive is likely filled with some weird Frankenstein files that make other devices choke.

Not all media players are made the same. We put some crazy hours going through a checklist of videos we thought the Boxee Box should be able to play. In Boxee playback you can trust. We think we have the best and most exhaustive player.

MKV, SSA, PGS, AC3, VC1, TS, H264, FLV, ASS, AVI, OGG, ISO, M2TS, VOB, SRT, AAC, FLAC, may be (should be) meaningless acronyms for some of the people reading this post, but they matter a lot when you click on a file and want play it rather than get an error message.

Waste hours watching videos shared on Twitter and Facebook

I can’t remember the last time I channel surfed on my TV (I don’t have cable now.., but even when I had one..). It is a frustrating, inefficient way to get to something you like in the age of the Internet, recommendation engines, social networks, etc.

It’s time for the TV experience to catch up.

Connect your Twitter or Facebook account to Boxee and get a feed of funny, thought provoking (well depends on who you follow) videos directly to your TV.

Search

I usually have no idea what I want to watch when I sit down on the couch, so seeing what my friends have shared or browsing through Netflix recommendations is what I usually do, but for the cases where I know I want to watch a clip from last night’s Colbert Report or a music video I heard about Search is the answer.

In Boxee you are always a click away from a search bar that lets you search the Boxee TV Shows, Movies and Apps libraries as well as the entire web for videos.  Even better, the Boxee Box will start searching as soon as you start typing… it’s like Quiksilver for your TV.

HTML5 FTW

Frankly we would hate to see the future of made for TV experiences be built on top of a couple of proprietary app platforms that result in a bunch of disconnected islands. We hope the future of made-for-TV apps will be HTML based, so everything is linkable, searchable, shareable, etc. The stuff that makes the web great.

Boxee now supports HTML5 apps, which means that if you write an HTML page designed for 10ft it will work on any Boxee and Google TV devices, and hopefully other platforms will embrace this trend rather than try and invent their own platforms, which makes life hard for content owners, developers and ultimately slows down innovation in this space.

NY Times, HBO, Turner, USA Today, Vimeo, YouTube and many others have already created HTML5 Apps. We hope thousands more will follow.

And a browser, too

We are not big believers of browsing the generic web on the TV screen. Your laptop, tablet or mobile phone are much better devices for that purpose, but there are a lot of videos out there that you can only reach by opening a browser or typing a URL, so the Browser is kind of a fall-back in case there is no easier, quicker, cleaner option of getting to a video you want to watch.

This version of Boxee includes a beta version of our WebKit browser. You can type any URL go interact with the webpage, fill a form, launch a video in fullscreen. It’s not the greatest experience, but it usually gets the job done.

Changes to the user interface

For those of you of who have been using the Boxee Beta, this version includes quite a few UI changes.

Home Screen: The home screen of Boxee is simpler making it easier to navigate for new users. It features content or apps we believe are worth checking out and big, clear links to the main sections of Boxee

Menu: We made some big changes to the main menu. You can bring it up by clicking the Menu button. It enables you to quickly navigate through TV Shows, Movies and Apps or search for something.

Music / Photos: We’ve really focused this version of Boxee on video.  With that in mind we decided to push music and photos into the files menu until we give it a little more TLC.

New Apps:

VEVO is the web’s number one premium music video service with over 1.1 billion worldwide streams and nearly 60 million unique visitors in the U.S. and Canada each month.  They’ve done an amazing job at giving people one coherent place to get great high quality vids from today’s top artists.  Building an app with VEVO was a no-brainer.

You’ll get access to

• the latest videos featured on VEVO,
• channels curated by VEVO like throwback hip-hop, alt rock, and Indie
• up close interviews, impromptu performances caught on tape, and other videos
• the Top 10 videos on VEVO and across major genres this week

So jump into the app and turn your TV into a music video jukebox.

Vice Magazine is one part Lonely Planet, one part National Geographic, one part Vogue, one part Nightline, and one part Hot or Not…  If you’re looking for a gateway into underground culture anywhere in the world, chances are someone from Vice has the keys, which is why we’re excited to have VBS.TV, a video offshoot of Vice now on Boxee.

The brainchild of Shane Smith, Eddy Moretti, Suroosh Alvi and Spike Jonze, the Vice Broadcasting System (VBS) is a web-only network that streams a mix of domestic and international news, pop and underground culture coverage, and the best music in the world. People have used words like eclectic, smart, funny, shocking, and revolutionary to describe VBS, but we prefer to think of them as a shining example of fresh, interesting content that might be too interesting for mainstream TV.

Lastly, Accuweather has been kind enough to give us access to their weather API to build out a good looking app on Boxee.  We still don’t know which way high and low pressure systems turn, but we figure the weather channel makes money so there’s got to be something to this.  They’ve been a great partner and we look forward to bringing more apps

We’re getting all set up for the Boxee Box launch party in a few hours. For everyone not in New York, the kind folks at Watchitoo will be streaming the event live starting at 7:30pm EST. Their application will allow us to add some interactivity to the event… check it out here and chat with us during the event!