The Boxee Box is almost ready to come to market, and pre-orders are opening today at $229, just slightly over the “under $200” mark they were originally shooting for.  Surprisingly, however, they’ve made a last-minute hardware change and ditched the NVidia Tegra 2 and replaced it with the Intel Atom CE4100, the same chip powering the Google TV.  That seems an odd decision, but Avner Ronen has a good explanation for it:

“The major problem we had with the Tegra 2 was support for high-profile HD playback,” he said. “You can do high-profile VC-1 with Tegra 2, but not H.264.” It was a problem of bitrate, he told us, and while NVIDIA’s dual-core Tegra T20 was apparently not up to the task, the team had internally tested Intel’s CE4100 decoding streams at up to 90 megabits per second. The newly revamped Boxee Box is now capable of 1080p H.264 playback at 60fps, and… well, that’s actually about it.

That’s a bit damning for NVidia and the Tegra system, being incapable of H.264 HD playback at high bitrates, and surely one NVidia is addressing as we speak.

via Boxee Box ditches NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 for Intel CE4100, pre-orders start today at $229 MSRP — Engadget.