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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The0ne - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I am also very interested in a comparison write-up. I would save me time and effort to do what you guys would do more properly and timely. Please keep us inform.ProDigit - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
"Multi terrabyte harddrives"?It's hard for me to believe you actually stuffed them with legal info, unless it's raw VOB or bluray rips!
A search engine is not necessary if you know how to organize your video's. I have anime series all organized like this:
- Anime
+ good
++ Anime 1
++ Anime 2
++ ....
+ Completed
++ Anime 3
++ Anime 4
++ ....
+ Uncompleted
++ ....
+ Bad
++ ....
+ Abandoned / Uncompleted
++ ....
- Disney
+ ....
- Movies
+ 1999-2000
++ ....
+ 2001-2004
++ ....
And regardless of what movie, I always remember where to find my data, because I arranged it, and I have seen it all (unlike some individuals who plug their pc into the net, and start downloading 24/7 until they have nothing more to download, and not know they actually are downloading each movie twice or trice; not even knowing if the movie they downloaded is the correct one).
When someone says to me they have "several 1TB harddrives full of movies" I seriously question the legitimacy of their actions.
It would take all the video's I've ever owned, purchased, or watched in my lifetime to fill 1TB of space (if they are around 700MB/1,5hrs movie). That'd translate to over 1400 movies, and not even my local movie rentals has that many in their store!
ThePooBurner - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
My cousin owns 1400 DVDs. And since this is a HD streaming unit, i highly doubt that they are talking about crappy quality 700mb rips.ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
I actually have ripped all my regular DVDs and blu-rays as .VOBs and .iso's respectively. If you take into account that each blu-ray movie is about 40 GB on a disc, then within 25 movies you have used up 1 TB of space. Even if you rip just the video file and main HD audio file to an .mkv, your still looking at almost 20 GB per movie, so you'd get to 50 High def movies before you fill a TB drive. So yes, I have multiple terabyte drives. I could probably compress them down to 720p .mkvs with the HD audio track and not lose much quality, but I would rather just watch the .iso file and be done with it as I do watch the extras a fair amount.As for the folder structure, I typically watch movies using PowerDVD 9 and My movies 3 in windows media center. Since you point My Movies 3 to the .iso file or .vob file for each movie, I have no reason to remember which drive I saved a specific movie too. I can simply load Windows Media Center, select My Movies, and pick a film as they are all displayed in alphabetical order with their cover art. When I add a new movie I simply add it to My Movies 3 and point the database to the file, and then I don't have to think about it again.
pomatoso - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Hello,I have a question.
I have a lot of DVD .iso images.
Does the Patriot allow to navigating menù without uncoding DVD in ifo/vob files?
I'm not talking about BR, just traditional DVD.
Thank you.
Pom
Voo - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Am I the only one who has problems with the needed "fixes" to stream media from a Win7 system? If you're using LM hashes to store your password you can forgo anypassword immediatly, it's not as if that would stop anyone. Also what's with users who use passwords with more than 14 characters? LM Hashes don't work for those.Probably not a big problem in a home environment, but nevertheless a bad solution..
vshah - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
The interface is strikingly similar, even identical in certain places, to the Asus O!Play HDP-R1, which has similar capabilities. I wonder if the products are somehow related.spacemonkey211 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
This really isn't that new of a category. There are at least 5 players in this ~$100 price point...Roku player, WD TV (gen 1, 2 and Live), Prodigi Player, ASUS O!Play, CinemaTube, etc...
In fact most reviews that I have read show that the Patriot Box is really mediocre compared to the competition.
mcnabney - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
So which player is best for me?I have/need:
Stream .VOBs in folders off of a WHS
Tune-in TV from HDHomeRun
Can connect to an oldish HDTV through DVI (probably w/ adapter) that only supports 1080i.
Hulu, NetFlix streaming
Perhaps even 'lite' browsing for in-a-pinch situations
I run gigabit ethernet and wireless
Play lossless WMA audio off WHS
Search/display/slideshow .JPGs off WHS
KoVaR - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
I find it disappointment that it only supports 100Mb Ethernet