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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GokieKS - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Can you test to see what's the subtitle support (SRT/SSA/ASS) like?The thing looks pretty cheap (the power switch being tilted is quite jarring), but that's a minor issue. The working bits seem solid, and if subtitle support is good, could be just what I'm looking for.
ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
I'll take a look at it this evening and post the results back here.ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
ART and SSA are definitely supported, and switching is actually quite easy, same goes for the audio. I didn't have anything available with ASS subtitles. But browsing through the manual I saw the following...Box Office supports srt, sub, smi, idx+sub, ssa, ass. So it looks like you should be coveredDirector - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
A couple of media streaming boxes (ahem Netgear) won't stream from W7 machines, something to do with the way Samba shares work on windows 7. How did this box go?Cheers
strikeback03 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
Umm, that is made pretty clear both in the text and the conclusion that a few registry tweaks are necessary on the Win7 machine for streaming to work.gigahertz20 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
This Patriot media device doesn't sound up to par with the Popcorn Hour line of media players or even the WD TV Live. I'd go with one of those before going with this thing.With the D-Link Boxee Box and Sybas Popbox coming out soon, this Patriot media box is dead in the water. It seems like 2010 is the year of stand alone digital media players, I wonder which one will come out on top.
If Microsoft and Sony would have made the X-Box 360 and PS3 into true digital media players, there would be no market for stand alone players like Popcorn Hour, WD TV Live, and all these others coming out. It would have been great if I could have filled up a portable hard drive with movies in several different codecs and just plugged it into a USB slot on my X-Box 360 and have it play everything back perfectly, but the X-Box 360 doesn't even support movies that have 5.1 audio, FAIL!
Microsoft and Sony could have really made their console systems great and gave people another reason to purchase them. I wonder why they don't add a plethora of video codec/audio support? All they need to do is send out an update to add the support, imagine being able to play back every digital file you have through your game console and not have to buy a separate box just to do that, come on Microsoft and Sony, what is stopping them?
chdude3 - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
OK dude, look at the price of a Popcorn versus a WDTV or the Patriot. Different class of player and not a fair comparison.And I think one big selling point that was overlooked is the fact that the Patriot box fully supports DVD Menus for your ripped movies (and I think for Blu Ray as well - if not right now then with the coming firmware). I don't think ANY of the WD units do that.
Suntan - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
If they can get full BR menus and/or HDA bitstreaming with a firmware update, I’d be extremely impressed. They aren’t the first company to use this chipset (it’s all over out there) and they aren’t the first company to have their customers ask for menu support and HDA bitstreaming.That said, they also wouldn’t be unique if they promised new features would be added with a future firmware update only to string their customers along for months on end… (PCH I’m looking right at you….)
-Suntan
Penti - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
Popcorn Hour C-200 supports retail (encrypted) BD's and DVD's. Thus also menus. But I'm sure Patriot will not release anything of the sort. Simple BD is possible though I guess.ajlueke - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
I think Realtek deserves a lot of credit here. Bringing out a multimedia decoding chipset with this kind of capability at this price? A year ago, to get HDA on the PC required the purchase of $100 blu-ray software, and then a $200 soundcard.