The Patriot Box Office Review: A Portent of Great Things to Come
by Alan Lueke on February 16, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gadgets
- Home Theater
- Media Streamer
- Patriot
- HTPC
Final Words
Overall, Patriot’s Box Office represents a great first effort by a company making its first steps into the field of consumer electronics devices. The box’s main feature is to play just about any media file type and bring your media collection to your big screen. It can bitstream the core audio codecs or send LPCM over HDMI, and stream even the the highest bitrate media over a wired 100Mb Ethernet connection. This is all very impressive for a device at a sub $100 price point with mail in rebate at the time of publication from Amazon (or $99 from Newegg). With the addition of the hi-def audio playback in a future firmware update, I would seriously consider this device over some of its more expensive competitors. You would be hard pressed to find more features and functionality at this price point. On PC you can pay $100 just for the software needed to play hi-def movies in Media Center, not to mention the other hardware required to enable hi-def audio. Or you can get this box and a large USB drive and be on your way today.
All that being said, know what your own needs are as the Patriot Box Office is far from a perfect all in one solution. This is not quite a consumer level product yet. It requires some registry tweaking for Windows 7 sharing, and a PC to enable bittorrent and internet content support. The internet content support is far from user friendly and is a ways behind products like Boxee in terms of ease of use and overall implementation. If you want to be able to stream full quality Blu-ray movies this device may work at present, assuming you have a robust enough network and keep the Box Office connected via Ethernet. Overall the capabilities of the supported wireless adapter were underwhelming. It limited us to a sub-10Mbps bitrate.
Also in need of improvement is the very basic GUI. Browsing through endless folders is okay, but if you have multiple TB hard drives like I do, each one full of movies, it can be hard to remember where a specific one is located. A media aggregator or search function would be welcomed here, or something to show cover art the way My Movies does within Media Center. The Box Office's shortcut function wasn’t quite up to the task for me.
There are a few things in the works though, like the aforementioned hi-def audio support, as well as a wireless-n USB adapter. (Ed: Note that 11n networking still rarely comes anywhere near the throughput of even 100Mb Ethernet unless you live in an area with few other wireless signals. With four neighbors running 11g networks, I'm lucky to get a stable 54Mb connection; enable 11n and my WiFi network fails within minutes to hours--and I've tried four different routers!) If you’re not afraid to go wired, you’ll be able to stream your home videos, pictures, music and some nice looking 720p transcodes of your hi-def movies today. If you're not afraid to use the internal HDD bay and some USB drives you can play back a sizeable collection of full definition Blu-ray .iso or .mkv files. You can even stream your standard def .vob files from your PC and save your USB drive space for the hi-def movies. You can also add non-copyrighted content over bittorrent to round out your collection. If your main diet of TV and movies comes from internet sources, then perhaps it may be better to look at a different option. While there is support for aggregators like TVersity, it is far from user friendly or seamless in execution. All in all, the Patriot Box Office is hard to beat at its price point, and really leads one to believe that true affordable “All-in-one” solutions are perhaps just a generation or two away.
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VideoGrabber - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
I'm confused. The review says,> As long as both my source PC and the Box Office were on wired ethernet I could play _full bitrate Blu-ray on the Box Office over the network_. <
Then, in two other spots, it refers to a need to transcode the BR material down to 720p, to be able to play over the network. So, which is it? Thanks.
BCarr - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - link
Just recieved mine, won't play my itunes .m4v, which is disappointing, because I bought mostly for that reason. I guess I'll buy the overpriced AppleTV that does less.ajlueke - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
Strange. I tried playing a video that came with one of my albums off itunes also in the .m4v format and it played fine. It will of course, not play protected files. The digital copy of Zombieland for example is protected and only plays on my PC and synced iPhone, when I try to play the file over the box office I do get the "invalid format". But it should play any unprotected .m4v videos you have.Bloodx - Saturday, February 20, 2010 - link
HDI Dune player is the only streamer that works. Unless you can play ISO bluray rips with the real menus and hd bitstreming audio the box is useless.Sanctusx2 - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
The device sounds interesting, particularly after the promised firmware updates hit. I had one lingering question though: it was tested it with mkvs, but I'd like to know if it handles mkvs/avis with subtitles included(either externally or embedded). I've always found this to be a challenge with media playing devices and even transcoders like TVersity/Windows Media Sharing usually choke, necessitating a manual encode to embed the subtitles.QChronoD - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Alan, I loved your write up.Are there any plans for putting together a roundup of different boxes? I've never been able to find a place that has a good comparison of which ones are better for people who primarily want to serve their own media.
OT, When you're using My Movies in WMC, do you ever have the extra info (cast, synopsis, etc) not show up for random movies? Some of my movies it's blank, and I can't figure out how to fix it w/o deleting and rescanning everything.
scoobymich - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
I'd recommend this site for reviews of media players / NMT's. It has a ton of information and a great community. I hope it helps you with your decision!http://www.mpcclub.com">http://www.mpcclub.com
bobbozzo - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I'd also be interested in seeing a budget-htpc article... I think you guys started some mini-itx articles but never finished.I know there are lots of little pc's around $300 that can do 1080p h.264 playback and use very little power.
thanks
ajlueke - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
I am interested in doing a media box roundup myself. As for budget HTPCs, d you have a model from a vendor as an example? Is $300 the limit of what would be consider "budget"? I have a HTPC as my main source of TV and movies, but it is anything but budget as I play a fair amount of games as well. Let me know which sorts of products you are most interested in.scboley - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
This one is the most impressive looking I've found yet based on the same realtek chipset. I have a patriot and love it but this menu and net support on this version blows the patriots functions away and hopefully the next firmware from patriot will address and add these functions. http://www.xtreamerusa.net/index.html">http://www.xtreamerusa.net/index.html