Boxee pushes Vudu update

Slightly later than planned, Boxee on Wednesday rolled out Vudu access on the Boxee Box. The firmware upgrade gives the media hub its first access to top-tier, commercial movies in the US, with many purchases and rentals coming the same day as they do on DVD. The Boxee's Atom chip is fast enough to decode Vudu's signature HDX format at its full 1080p and 5.1-channel Dolby Digital Plus surround.

Rentals start at as little as $2 for two nights in the back catalog and scale up to $6 for new rentals. Anyone who signs up directly from the Boxee Box will get a $6 credit to get them started.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen also acknowledged the Netflix update and said it was still on time for its late January arrival.

The addition of Vudu is a major lift to Boxee, whose hub's primary limitation versus the Apple TV and others has been its lack of mainstream material beyond some websites.

Updating for Vudu support also brings a number of general fixes, including a fix for accidental disconnects from Mac OS X Samba shares, surround sound audio decoding problems, better handling of video aspect ratios and a number of crash bugs.

By Electronista Staff