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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ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
That really seems to be the route the industry is pushing the desktop into. You have a large home server that contains your storage space, and then modular devices to tap into that content, like a media box, and a notebook for productivity etc.I don't think Boxes like this are meant to replace an HTPC as the hub of the home entertainment network.
For me personally, most of these boxes lack enough internal storage space to hold all my movies, music pictures etc, so I need to have a desktop or server for that anyway to stream off of. I really like the 360s capability to stream my media center interface and watch my recorded TV, a feature I think I will use more with the launch of the Ceton cable cards next month. http://cetoncorp.com/products.php">http://cetoncorp.com/products.php
But it lacks support for .iso and many other popular movie formats. Boxes like the Patriot are able to play just about all of my local content but cannot play my recorded TV. There always seems to be something missing so in the end, I just hook up the desktop directly to my receiver and call it good. The I also have easy access to Hulu, netflix and Boxee on the PC, and if you have an Iphone you can use an app like Hipporemote to control the various programs(love that app!)
What Boxes like this are useful for, is streaming content for the main home theater to a bedroom television or something of that nature. The living room is currently the center of my home entertainment experience, with movies, music and games ampily supplied by a PC. But for $100 a box like this a great way to get some of that content into the bedroom or a game room etc.
Pjotr - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I use Windows Home Server in a smaller ATX box that fits, with an extra 3x5.25" enclosure that fits 4x3.5" HDs, a total of 9 HDs. I buy 1-2 new drives each year and retire the oldest smallest drive at intervals. Windows Home Server is superb in the way you can just keep adding storage seemlessly.I use a PS3 to play my media, using the http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/">http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/ to repackage and/or recode on the fly from the WHS based on format. It handles every format I've ever tried (it can also serve XBox, mobile devices etc!). The PS3 sees the WHS/PS3MS as a media server and I just play from there.
snKorst - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
none of them have VGA or DVI outand none of them can at least read if not record DVB-S.
Why would i need this box, when i need another box playing real time TV and switch for them? Just another useless device built in huge quantities around some new multimedia all-in-one chip.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Umm, for a media player device HDMI seems to be a perfectly reasonable connection.chdude3 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Not to mention that with a physical adapter you can connect HDMI to DVI... Essentially, anything with HDMI *does* support DVI.taltamir - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
I am talking from experience here, wireless g is unacceptable for movie streaming.Only wireless N can stream movies.
wired naturally works well. Although its better to have the files locally.
This thing could really use an open source OS (which means it will get upgrades even when a newer version comes out) and netflix streaming.
ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
In regards to the open source OS, you can download it here...http://patriotmemory.com/products/manuals/boxoffic...">http://patriotmemory.com/products/manuals/boxoffic...
legoman666 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Indeed. I've found that I can stream up to 100mb/s on my wireless N connection, which is more than enough for any HD movie.JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
So I have to ask: what sort of router do you use for you 11n network? I've gone through a LinkSys, a D-Link, and now I'm on a TrendNet. Granted, all are "Draft 2.0" 11n routers, but I'm not sure if the finalized spec would help or not. My problem is this:From my home, I can see at least five other networks. My local WiFi is the best signal, and the others are secured, but they seem to cause a lot of interference. If I enable the dual-channel 11n support in my router(s), I get regular drop-outs of WiFi, and the only recourse is to reboot the router. So, I've now dropped down to 20MHz 11n/11g and it doesn't crash as much. If I really want it to stay stable, I need to run in 11g only mode.
Now, with 40MHz dual-channel 11n, I can transfer at up to ~9MB/s (close to 100Mbit Ethernet), but that's only if I'm transferring wired to wireless; transfer between two laptops and the rate drops to about 2-3MB/s.
In short, 11n WiFi has been hugely disappointing to me. I'm trying to determine if it's my neighborhood, router, or a combination of those. If you've had a lot more success in a neighborhood with several visible WiFi networks, like I said, I'd love to know what router you're using! (And let's not even get into my 2.4GHz wireless landline phone blasting away my network.... Gotta upgrade that for sure!)
therealnickdanger - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
I use the D-Link DIR-655 and consistently get real-world transfer speeds of 25MB-33MB/sec (megabytes) over the wireless anywhere in the house (two stories) or out in the seperated garage with my N-devices. My G-devices are always maxed out. I even let my next door neighbor leech off me. It sits in the basement under the kitchen floor (centrally located).I loved it so much that I bought for my parents and installed it in their house. Same results. We each run Atom 330 Windows Home Servers and use them for backups and streaming. I can stream Blu-Ray rips effortlessly to multiple devices at once.
It was on sale for $85 on Newegg last week, I think. I highly recommend it.
Oh! One thing to note, you have to go into the settings and double the rate from 20Hz to 40Hz in order to get the higher speeds. Also, I run mine in mixed mode. Good luck!