Patriot Box Office Core Media Player Review

With the fast increasing amount of digital data being stored on home PCs and laptops its easy to feel restricted when using it on your PC or laptop. Its therefore important to consider options which allow you to access your data more easily to allow it to be shared and accessed as it was intended to be. There are many options to consider when looking at ways to access your digital content around your home. You could consider building a media centre which could then be used as a PVR as well or you could look to purchase a media player to connect to your PCs shared content. Alternatively you could consider to upgrade your TV to one of the new generation which supports connecting to your home network and allowing you to access your data. We take a look at the PBO (Patriot Box Office) Core Media Player from Patriot which are more widely known for there high performance memory. The Patriot Box Office opens up options to allow movies / video, music and pictures to be accessed on the family TV allowing all the family to take advantage of the digital content from multiple sources. PackagingThe top of the box display a picture of the Patriot Box Office. It also shows the Patriot and Box Office branding. The front of the box displays pictures of the Patriot Box Office from various angles and also displays the Patriot and Box Office branding. The right side of the box provides details of the features of the Patriot Box Office. It also lists the included contents. The back of the box continues the theme of displaying the Patriot and Box Office Branding and displays logos of key features and standards which the Patriot Box Office supports. On the left side of the box it displays some of the key features in nine different languages. The Patriot and Box Office comes supplied with the following accessories: HDMI 1.3 Cable Composite AV Cable AC Adaptor USB Cable Software CD Remote Control Batteries Quick Installation Guide A Closer Look The Patriot Box Office is housed in a sturdy aluminium case, the front and back are plastic. At the front of the Patriot Box Office there is a USB port, Infa Red as well as USB, HDD, LAN and power LEDs. At the back of the Patriot Box Office are connections for composite, optical audio, HDMI, USB and wired Ethernet. There is also a power switch and power supply connection. Both of the side feature the Patriot Box Office brand and logo. Hard Drive InstallationOpening up the Patriot Box Office was a simple process. At the back of the Patriot Box Office there are two screws which once removed allows easy access to the internal components within the Patriot Box Office. The Patriot Box Office has a solid internal construction with metal protecting the PCB and providing a mount for a 2.5" SATA Hard Drive to be installed. The PCB of the Patriot Box Office can be seen from the bottom. I used a Seagate 7200.4 500GB 2.5" hard drive for our testing. The installation process was straight forward, the drive pushed directly into the SATA connection and then was secured by a screw on each side. The picture below shows the Seagate 7200.4 500GB Hard Drive secured into the Patriot Box Office. SoftwareWhen powering on the Patriot Box Office for the first time the Patriot Box Office logo is displayed for a few seconds while the device loads up. Once loaded the Patriot Box Office interface is displayed. The Patriot Box Office defaults at the browser screen which can be used to playback and viewing media. Once you select between the supported playback options of All, Music, Photo and Movies the navigation screen below is displayed. This allows you to choose between the source of where you would like to play your previously chosen media files from. The options are USB (such as an external Hard Drive or Pen Drive), HDD (The Internal Hard Drive, if installed), DVD, NET (providing a local network connection is available to the device through wired or wireless connectivity - the wireless adaptor is optional and was not available for review), UPNP (Using an available UPNP source) or alternatively you can choose a previously created playlist. The screens of the Patriot Box Office can be navigated using the arrow keys on the remote control, the next screen on the menu is the setup menu. This allows for Audio, Video, Network, System and Misc settings to be configured for your equipment. The audio options allow for the Digital output to be selected between various supported HDMI standards and various optical audio standards. The next menu provides access to allow copying of files from USB, HDD, DVD or Network. Once the source (any of the playback sources above can be used) and destination have been selected the files can be copied using the interface below. The Patriot Box Office also includes the ability to playback media from an RSS Video capable source over the internet, the next menu called IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) allows you to do this. Once entering the IMS menu your presented with the options of viewing Video News, Video Podcasts, ESPN Radio, Weather, RSS News, Stock, Picasa and Flickr. Each section contains predefined feeds and allow you to enter your own RSS feed. PerformanceTo test the capabilities of the Patriot Box Office we connected the Patriot Box Office up using HDMI to a 42" Panasonic Plasma 1080p TV and a Pioneer Amp using digital optical Audio to the Patriot Box Office and for a fairly entry level media player its performance was very impressive. We tested the Patriot Box Office using various different types of media, these included MKV, DVD ISO, XVID, DIVX, MOV to name a few. These various types of media also included a variety of differently encoded audio formats. In every case the Patriot Box Office was able to playback the video and audio perfectly without and stutter or appearance of playback issues all the way from 720p, 1080i upto 1080p over our wired network connection from a share on a windows 7 PC. The pictures above and below were taken during playback of the Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer playing back on the Patriot Box Office. USB: One of the easiest ways to transfer media onto an internal hard drive installed in the Patriot Box Office to simply connect it to your PC using USB and drag and drop the files. Unfortunately during testing the transfer speeds were disappointing with only 16 MB / second being recorded when reading and writing to the device using windows 7. This possibly due however to the Linux based file system used by the Patriot Box Office and the overheads this presents when being used as a USB device on a windows host. Final ThoughtsThe Patriot Box Office is a neat, compact device which has the added bonus of being able to be used with an internal 2.5" SATA hard drive to playback your media from or be used by the build in Bit Torrent client to download content directly to. Its playback capabilities are impressive and it performed flawlessly in this regard. When setting up the network connectivity to the device however we did need to change some permissions on windows 7 to allow it to connect to the network share, Patriot themselves do document some details of how to setup the device for windows 7 which can be found here. As you can see it required changing some registry settings which is far from ideal and did not seem to like the password authentication of windows 7 although after making the recommended changes it worked perfectly. If you're a less technically advanced user I would strongly advise using a UPNP server on your PC to share your content rather than using a file share, unless you're not using security on your shares and are happy for them to be accessible by anyone on your local network. Overall although it does have its downsides I think the Patriot Box Office is fantastic value for money considering the features and flexibly it offers for the price and would recommend it to those user who are a bit more technical and looking looking for a feature rich media player. Attached files 1.jpg (77.2 KB) 2.jpg (157.3 KB) 3.jpg (108.4 KB) 4.jpg (83 KB) Home.jpg (187.9 KB) Patriot_1.jpg (174.3 KB) Patriot_2.jpg (109.7 KB) Patriot_3.jpg (77.3 KB) Patriot_Bundle.jpg (84.7 KB) patriot_close_bottom.jpg (130.3 KB) patriot_close_top.jpg (170.3 KB) patriot_close_top_hdd.jpg (155.6 KB) patriot_close_top_hdd_2.jpg (129.9 KB) Patriot_File_Copy.jpg (189 KB) Patriot_File_Copy_GUI.jpg (131.6 KB) Patriot_Home_Options.jpg (114.1 KB) Patriot_IMS.jpg (186 KB) Patriot_IMS_PodcastTechnology.jpg (138.8 KB) Patriot_Packing_1.jpg (184.7 KB) Patriot_Packing_2.jpg (67.9 KB) Patriot_Packing_3.jpg (191.2 KB) Patriot_Packing_4.jpg (72.7 KB) Patriot_Packing_5.jpg (91.8 KB) Patriot_Sample_1.jpg (187.7 KB) Patriot_Sample_2.jpg (171.7 KB) Patriot_Setup.jpg (191.7 KB) Patriot_Setup_Audio.jpg (110.1 KB) pbocore.jpg (15.1 KB) PBO_Core_Front.jpg (39.8 KB) silver.jpg (12.4 KB)