discussion Patriot Box Office Media Player Review

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Patriot Box Office Media Player Review

Manufacturer's Product Page: Patriot Memory - Products
Part Number: PCMPBO25
Tekwiki:Patriot Box Office Media Player - TechWiki
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Over the last year, stand-alone media players have been surging in popularity and if you are like most people we know, you may not understand why people are attracted to these pint-sized products. You may not even see the need for them considering the prevalence of DVD players, Blu-Ray players and PVR / DVRs that “just work” for most of if not all of your media needs. However, with the explosion of internet-based broadcasts and the legal downloading of movies, shows and other videos to your PC, the market is slowly moving away from the traditional means of getting media onto your TV.

Home Theatre PCs are an option for streaming all of this online content onto your screen but even the least expensive ones come at a price of several hundred dollars and consume far more power than your typical DVD player. In addition, several game consoles have touted their media playback and streaming capabilities but once again, their potential is limited and the asking price is quite high. To fill the gap between a basic disk player and an expensive HTPC, several companies have released what they call Digital Media Players. Today we take a look at one such product: Patriot’s Box Office.

Past versions of media players have been extremely limited in their uses and compatibility. The less expensive ones had support for a few video and audio codecs but didn’t support any type of future expansion and usually needed an external storage device (be it a flash card, USB stick, external HDD, etc) containing media to be plugged in. Other devices such as the famous Popcorn Hour have offered a bevy of media features but at prices that many were unwilling to pay.

The reasoning behind the Box Office is quite simple even though its uses are quite far-reaching. Basically, Patriot is aiming this player at a market that has been long looking for a cost effective and compact way of playing or streaming media files to their television. With full 1080P compatibility, support for both external and internal storage along with the possibility of network streaming, this product sure looks ready for the big-time. It also supports a wide range of media formats including H.264, ISO, VOB, DivX, xVid, MKV, MOV and MPEG just to name a few.

Considering its price of under $150 CAD, the Box Office has the potential to be a must-have for users who want the ability to play a long list of media files on their TV but just don’t have the patience to deal with codec issues and the extravagant prices of some HTPCs.

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Specifications

Specifications

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Packaging and Accessories

Packaging and Accessories

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The box this media player comes in is not only colourful but chock-full of details. This was totally expected since Patriot always seems to package their products quite well which not only adequately protects but also gives all the information a customer would need to make an informed decision.

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Opening up the box we can see that Patriot did go for a multi-zone and multi-layered approach when it comes to protection. The player itself is suspended in place with two large Styrofoam end caps which keeps it firmly in place and below it is another box which contains the accessories. This is a nice, safe and secure way of doing things as the accessories are kept away from the player and thus can’t inflict any shipping induced damage to the Box Office.

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Speaking of the accessories which accompany this unit, we are actually impressed with everything Patriot managed to shoe horn into the budget. As with the Asus 0!Player you get composite cables, an external power adaptor, USB cable and a CD with the instruction manual on it. However, they went that extra mile and actually included a HDMI 1.3 compliant cable as well. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is one less cost Patriot hasn’t off loaded unto their customers like most manufactures in this product niche do.

 

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A Closer Look at the Patriot Box Office

A Closer Look at the Patriot Box Office

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While it is hard to convey this unit’s size in pictures, let’s just say it’s damn small; 5.6” x 1.5” x 5.7” to be exact but weighs in a slightly over a pound before the HDD is installed. Quite a bit of this weight is due to the fact that Patriot chose an extremely high quality metal enclosure for this product which puts the plastic-clad competition to shame. One upside to this robust frame is the fact that it can act like a heatsink to disperse the heat from the internal components. This should be especially useful for keeping hot-running hard drives cool in an enclosed environment.

While we usually subscribe to the thought of “different strokes for different folks”, there is no doubt that the Box Office is one sexy little media player. Its fit and finish are top notch and the metal enclosure is just the icing on the cake considering how well it helps this product blend into all your other AV components.

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The front of this unit is the Box Office area which contains any plastic. This is to be expected and since metal here would necessitate the drilling of holes for the IR receiver, LEDs and other items. Nonetheless, as with the overall appearance of this unit, Patriot seems to have taken the time to get things right.

From left to right you have a front USB port, which is nice to see as this should make plugging in a secondary external storage device even easier than blindly fumbling around the back to find a free port. This is followed by a nice gap to allow even overly wide USB thumb drives to be used here without causing any issues. After this you have the IR receiver area, followed by another gap to allow oblique angle “shots” from your remote to hit the receiver without interference. To the extreme right there is a cluster of information LEDS which includes USB, HDD and LAN activity. Rounding out the front panel is an easy to see power indication LED (which is not too bright or distracting)..

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When you look at the two sides of this unit, one thing which is interesting is the fact that there are no USB ports. Unlike many media players we have used, Patriot has gone for a front and back only approach to inputs. We find this to be one of the sanest approaches we have seen, and for the same reason you don’t find USB plugs on the sides of your PC: it’s a pain in the ass to use them. Otherwise, the sides get the usual metal treatment along with an engraved Box Office logo.

It is also good to see rubber feet on the bottom of the Box Office as this will prevent scratching your furniture if it slides around. We would have preferred slightly larger feet but these do well enough.

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Moving onto the back of this impressive little media center we come to a setup which is cluttered but still fairly decent. From the right to left, you have your three composite ports for older television sets which use standard definition signals which is followed by an S/PDIF port for digital audio out. However, be sure to remember that the Box Office only passes raw data: “S/PDIF-RAW” or 2.1 stereo formated “S/PDIF-LPCM” audio. While in some instances LPCM can be interleaved eight times to pass up to 8 distinct channels this particular model (and thus all the Realtek SoC based media players) only support the older LPCM interleaving of (up to) 2.1 stereo sound.

Sitting next to the audio port is the power switch and below it is the HDMI 1.3output. We really liked seeing a dedicated power switch as we hate having to rely on the remote to turn of a unit, or heaven forefend, unplug a unit to properly shut it down.

Back here there are an additional two USB ports. Unfortunately, as you can see there is plenty of room for Patriot to have gone with two full sized USB ports which is why we are a bit miffed at the inclusion of one full size and one mini port.

Rounding out the list of ports is the LAN port and AC power port. One nit we have to pick with this list of ports is the fact that the LAN port is 10/100 capable only and does not support Gigabit Ethernet. This is not a big deal for most files and formats but when you are streaming large 1080p files, this does leave open the possibility of stuttering due to the lack of overhead that the older 100 megabit Ethernet standard offers. In the testing stage we will take a closer look at this, but if past experiences hold true with this unit it may make for a potentially annoying streaming experience. We can say that this is not Patriot’s fault per say as every Realtek-based media player we have used in the past has also had this limitation and overcoming this would necessitate a dedicate LAN chip on the PCB. This of course would only add to the cost.

 

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Internal Impressions

Internal Impressions

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While we are used to reminding you that opening up most devices will void your warranty, the Box Office is meant to be opened for the installation of a 2.5” drive so we don’t have to worry about that. In a nutshell, you simply have to remove a few screws on the back of the Box Office and slide the metal shell off. Before we tear it down further lets go over what is visible with just this much dissembled.

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To one side of the media center chassis is a raised area where you drive goes. As you can see, there are small raised lips which form the outline of a 2.5” drive which is bordered by a typical SATA data and power port.

To install your hard drive, all you have to do is slide it into position and gently push it home so the connectors slide into position. With this done all you have to do is secure the drive in place with typical drive screws. The result is a simple and easy installation which should be fool proof as long as you take your time.

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The only other thing which is easily visible is the fan this unit sports which is a 9 bladed Power Logic PLA04710S12L unit. It is a 12volt 47mm x 10mm “low speed” sleeved fan but to be honest, Power Logic’s idea of “low speed” and our version differs greatly. While we cant be precise about its speed, the 40mm version of this fan (which is available online) moves at 5000rpm and the 50mm version moves at a brisk 3200rpm.

Interestingly enough, this fan has been set up to suck air from below the storage sub-chassis (where the PCB and chips are located) and into the storage area. We are not sure why Patriot has gone for this as it would make a heck of a lot of more sense to have the fan blowing down and onto the Realtek SOC heatsink. In any case, this is not our biggest gripe with this fan. That award goes to the fact this fan is extremely loud but luckily you probably won’t be able to hear it above your TV.

On the positive side this small fan does provide some much needed air movement and Patriot does state that it is not necessary if you plan on running your Box Office without internal storage. Though this is probably not going to cover too many people as two of the main claims to fame this model has is its active cooling and internal storage.

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To further disassemble the Box Office, you will have to patiently remove a whole bunch of screws and this is NOT recommended. We are doing this for demonstration purposes ONLY.

We can see the PCB is actually fairly simple and really only contains four important things: the Realtek SOC, Flash NAND storage chip, Ram chip and a few capacitors.

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All of the capacitors are made by CapXon and while they are far from the best manufacturer of caps, they are better than some. As long as the fan keeps up its end of the cooling bargain, we can’t ever see these becoming a failure point in this device.

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The on board storage this unit sports is a single Hynix HY27UF082G2B-TPCB NAND flash chip. This is a 3rd generation lead free single layer cell (SLC) chip that uses 2.7V ~ 3.6V and operates with single nCE (single Chip Enable control) and single R/nB (single Ready/Busy Output). It has a density of 256MB and has a temperature range of 0° - 70°C. Overall, it is a very good single chip solution for Patriot to have used in this media player since while it may not be the fastest NAND we have come across, it is more than fast enough for this unit. To our way of thinking, Patriot could have made a much, much worse choice.

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The ram Patriot has selected for their Patriot Box Office is a Nanya made DDR2 SDRAM module. To specific it is a NT5TU64M16CG-AC branded chip. This 128MB chip is rated for 400mhz at 5-5-5 @ 1.8 volts.

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While we can’t show you the actual Realtek chip our unit came with as we did not want to damage it by removing the heatsink, we can tell you it is a Realtek RTD1073DD unit. This is a third-generation System on a Chip (SOC) which Realtek classifies as a “Digital Media Processor” and since Patriot uses the “DD” version of the RTD1073 chip, it can natively decode AC3 and DTS audio.

 

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Control at Your Fingertips: The Remote

Control at Your Fingertips: The Remote

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Patriot calls the remote which accompanies this unit “full size” and we do have to take issue with this statement. While it is technically correct to call it a full sized remote based on length alone, it is not exactly hand filling. To be honest we would call the Patriot remote a ¾ remote as it is down right thin.

Ergonomics also takes a back seat with the sides being totally flat without any curves other than a small notch on the bottom of the unit. We prefer hour-glass shaped remotes (like the one found with the Asus 0!Player) as they are easier to handle and your hand just seems to fall into the proper place. However, what annoyed the heck out of us the large number of ultra small buttons. We don’t mind small buttons for seldom used options, but when the Play, Fast Forward, Rewind, Previous and Next buttons are small and poorly laid out we have to down grade a remote from “adequate” to “less than optimal”.

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In all reality, it feels like very little thought was given to the functionality of this remote even though the rest of the unit exceeds our expectations. We have a funny feeling that Patriot went with the generic, off the shelf remote and just silk-screened on the appropriate control descriptions. This becomes abundantly apparent when you are watching a movie with the lights out and flail around in a vain attempt to find a button.

 

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Patriot’s (Optional) Wireless USB Adaptor

Patriot’s (Optional) Wireless USB Adaptor

Our Patriot Box Office also came with the optional wire-less USB accessory which actually was included for free to anyone who pre-ordered this media player. Basically, this $25 add-on device should allow for wireless content streaming over 802. 11 b/g networks. It is however not only compatible with the Box Office but also with any USB-equipped device from PCs to Netbooks to Laptops.

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As you can see the box this wireless adaptor comes in is fairly small, yet colourful. The front of the box has a small plastic window so you can see the USB stick in all its glory. More important than the window or the bright colours was the fact that Patriot makes no bones about what this stick is: a b/g only adaptor. We really, really wish it had been N capable as G simply is on the tight side for streaming large, hit bit-rate video via a wireless connection.

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To be totally honest we were not expecting any accessories to come with this item and we were thus not surprised in the least when the accessory list turned out to be nothing more than a utility CD. Since this is designed to seamlessly work with the Patriot Box Office the CD is not needed for the purposes of this review. However, if you do at some point plan on using it on a Microsoft Windows PC the CD will come in handy as it contains the necessary drivers for proper operation.

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Patriot’s wireless adaptor is rated for a maximum output of 200 milliwatts (23dBM) and as such we expect it to perform extremely well and punch through numerous walls, floors, ceilings etc and have a reach that is right up there near the limits of 802.11G devices (indoor/outdoor is limited to 24dBM or 250 milliwatts). To be blunt, there is only so large an antenna you can shoe-horn into a compact USB device but for all these inherent limitations this is a very decent example of what you can do. For example 15 dBM (32mW) is the typical transmission power found in laptops and 20dBM (100mW) is what many wireless routers output. So the output of this unit is not the absolute most is could be certified for under the law but it is awfully darn close. This can translate into better signal reception and data transmission.

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Simply put we have no issues with the power output of this wireless adaptor, but sending a signal is only half the equation. In fact, some would say that for wireless streaming of high bit-rate video the ability of the unit to receive is paramount and we agree with them. This is why we had some initial doubts regarding this product’s performance when paired up to the Box Office.

Remember, you will be inserting this device into either the front or the back of a reasonably sized metal device which is likely surrounded by other AV components which means the prospects for good signal reception aren’t looking too great. To minimize the "shadow" of the Patriot Box Office you really are going to have to carefully consider where your router is located to in relation to the USB stick and place this little adaptor between the router and the metal box.

 

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Setup and Installation

Setup and Installation

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The real claim to fame this type of product has is its ease of installation, setup and use. The Patriot Box Office is no exception and adds in a surprising amount of versatility to the installation equation. Since it has access to internal, external and Network Attached Storage this versatility does come in handy.

To begin the installation you must first decide on whether or not you wish to take advantage of the internal storage capabilities this unit has to offer. Since we are going to do so, we started by first removing the metal case cover and installing our hard drive. It may have taken some time but we finally did find some use for the Pelican SSD we reviewed a long time ago. Once the hard drive is installed and the Box Office is reassembled all you really need to do is plug in your television A/V cables and turn on the power.

If you have chosen (like we did) to go for an internally mounted hard drive, upon first boot up it will ask you if you want to format the drive. We are firm believers in doing this as it does reduce compatibility issues and it only took two and half minutes for it to format our old and slow 64GB SSD. The amount of time it takes will vary depending upon the size, speed and type of drive you plan on using (expect large, slow hard disk drives to take much, much longer).

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When this is accomplished, you will be brought to a very simple screen with three options: File Copy, Browser and Setup. We recommend setting up your unit first as it will not have access to your network until you do so which renders the first and second options well pretty much useless at this point.

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Selecting “setup” brings you to a new screen with numerous options laid out in a tab format. The first one is “Audio” and this is where you will obviously tell the player how you want it to handle audio. The first option is called “night mode” and it basically reduces volume levels BUT keeps tonal levels normal which is nice to have but probably won’t be that useful for most people.

The second section is where you have audio output options which include HDMI LPCM, HDMI RAW, SPDIF LPCM and SPDIF RAW. Here is the full breakdown about what each one does:

HDMI LPCM: Tells the Box Office to internally decode the audio and push it out via the HDMI cable. The down side to this is the Box Office can only support 2.1 stereo via LCPM. It cannot and will not pass on 5.1 / 7.1 surround sound as this unit only has three interleaved LCPM streams to work with (left, right and bass).

HDMI RAW: This option passes the audio "as is" via the HDMI cable and does no internal decoding. It is up to the amp, or TV set to decode the audio streams. This is the only one of two options which will pass 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound on to your amp (assuming your amp has a HDMI cable port or your TV has multiple speakers and decoding abilites) and allow for the full "Home Theater Experience".

SPDIF LPCM: In this mode, the Patriot Box Office does internal decoding of the audio stream but can only pass up to 2.1 stereo to the S/PDIF cable. If you choose this option and have 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound it will be down converted to 2.1. This is unfortunate as newer, more expensive HTPC's can support up to 8 channels via 8 way interleaved LCPM and sadly this unit only can do 3 way interleaved LCPM streams.

SPDIF RAW: This option is very similar to HDMI RAW except instead of passing the audio via the HDMI port it passes the audio stream to the SPDIF connector without first internally decoding it. Since S/PDIF connectors are much more common on slightly older amplifiers this option is what many people needing surround sound should choose. Please note, you can still use the HDMI connector, but the unit will pass the audio via the SPDIF cable and not the HDMI.


The only thing missing is explanations for the various options when one is highlighted which would have reduced potential first time user confusion. Continuing on in the “first time users” vein and another thing which may trip up some people is that there are no options if you plan on using the composite audio connectors. Don’t worry; if you plug in the red and white composite cables it WILL use them for stereo sound. For our own tests we chose S/PDIF RAW.

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The next tab deals with video and it is easily the most important tab of them all. Before we get into it, we must warn you that if you DO mess up the video setting and set it to resolution higher than your TV supports, you will have to plug in the composite plugs for your video source as the Box Office does not have a “restore to factory settings” button (which SHOULD be standard on all home appliances). With this in mind let’s run down the important options.

First up is the Resolution (called TV System in the menu) section and Aspect Ratio. Under “TV System” is where you set what your TV or monitor’s resolution and the aspect ratio tells the Box Office what format to pump out the video in; be it 16:9, 4:3, NTSC or Auto. Conspicuous by its absence was 16:10. This leads us to believe this version of the firmware is outdated when compared to a similar Asus 0!Player (which uses the exact same menu interface and same Realtek SoC) which added this feature in firmware 1.13. The other option which is interesting to see is this product can perform some basic noise reduction but is lacking any image sharpening features. While we knew there would be no up-converting features to be found, this does put the Patriot Box Office media player at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the Western Digital TV Live player.

 

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The User Interface In Depth

The User Interface In Depth

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After the setup menus we described on the past page, you could simply exit back out and start enjoying your new media player. However, if you want to take advantage of the more advanced features like video streaming you will need to continue onto the next tab, the aptly named: Network tab. This tab has been broken up into two main sections: wired and wireless. If you did not purchase the wireless adaptor you can ignore the second section altogether. The first menu is very simple since all you have to do is tell the Box Office whether or not to use a hard IP address (which you key in manually) or to query your DHCP server. We set it to DHCP and it promptly got an IP from our router.

The wireless setup is not as straight forward as you not only have to make sure that your wireless router is broadcasting an SSID or you can forget about this device finding it. It also has to be either setup as an Open system or you will have to type in your WEP/WPA key. Since we live miles from our nearest neighbor we have our network already broadcasting without any protection so this was no big deal. It will be big deal as you may not be as lucky to have miles of open land around you and we have seen reports of users having a hell of a time getting wireless to work over their protected networks. In other words: “business as usual” when it comes to wireless media players.

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The second to last setup tab deals with various system setting and for the most part can be ignored….unless you messed up your resolution as here is where you will find the “restore to factory defaults” option. The other options include HDD formatting, selecting your language, text encoding (for subtitles, etc), System Info, Login Control and System Update. The last one is how you go about updating the firmware for the Box Office, something which Patriot is being tardy about while Login control is where you would set up File Sharing and BitTorrent features. We are not sure why anyone would want to use their media player to get their legal and legit torrents but more options are always better in our books.

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The very last tab called “Misc” deals with basically all the features which don’t really fit into one of the other tabs. There is a few which do stand out from the rest as nice features to see on such a budget priced player. These features include: Resume Play, Movie Preview and screen saver. The last is only important in that you can turn it OFF; however, movie preview is very, very nice since when you select a video the small box in the upper left hand corner will start to play it. This is a handy feature as it will help you find where you left off in a series (for example). Unfortunately this feature is also necessary as the Patriot Box Office IS running older firmware and doesn’t have “last played” list feature added into it yet (like the Asus 0!Player has since 1.13). On the positive side, Resume Play allows you to stop what you are watching and resume it later, even if you turned off the media player. We are not sure why anyone would want to turn these two features off but if you do, this is where you would find the option in the setup section.

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Once your unit is set up to your liking, you can then exit out of this section and go back to that simple three option main menu. To play a video you simply hit the Browser option. This opens up another simple yet intuitive GUI with your various options. You have four main options: All, Music, Photo, and Video. Yes you can use this player to listen your music and yes you can set it up to show your pictures, but for most people either “all” or “video” is going to be where they spend most of their time. It is for this reason Patriot has the defaults set to All.

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You then simply select where your media is located. If your media is on a drive attached (internally) to the media player you select HDD, if it is on your NAS you click NET. Like we said, it is pretty straight forward and while it won’t win any awards for best GUI it is easy to understand and even easier to use which are the two most important attributes you want in a video appliance! However, we did have a few hiccups with the responsiveness of the GUI, where it would take a second or two to respond to input commands from the remote.

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If you are like us and upon the first boot up said yes to formatting your internally mounted hard drive, but (unlike us) do not have a NAS you won’t be able to play any video until you copy your data over to the internal drive. This is as simple as plugging in a USB thumb-drive or as complicated as pushing it across your network from another computer. Simply select where the files are located as the source and select the internal drive (always labeled “HDD” in the Box Office menu) and off to the races you go. The only caveat is if you are running Windows 7 and are trying to get files off your “shared” folder/drive and unto the Box Office you are going to have to wait for a firmware update. This is a known issue with the Realtek SoC and earlier firmware. Asus solved this issue with 1.13, but Patriot is still on 1.07.

 

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Testing Methodology

Testing Methodology

To see whether or not a given review item can in fact play and play well a variety of media we have gathered together numerous files ranging from .RMV, DIVX, WMV (various versions), H.264, MKV and various DVD and Blu-Ray ISO’s. Taking things further we have also subcategorized them by resolution and NTSC/PAL format.

Playing a 480p file on a 480p T.V. should be relatively easy for any modern media appliance, but playing 480p on a 1080p T.V will show whether or not a product can in fact up-convert and how good a of a job it can do at it.

Conversely, showing a 1080p file on 480p TV should in theory be easy as the system just needs to down convert the resolution; sadly, the reality is if it the appliance does not have a powerful enough processor stuttering, audio sync problems or a jagged appearance to straight lines will occur.

We have included PAL formatted files as this combined with up-converting and down converting is the ultimate test for any media player (especially at 1080p resolution). PAL is a 25fps standard, whereas NTSC is a 29.97fps standard which adds in an extra layer of complexity which will show how powerful a given player really is.

Once performance testing of physically connected files (whether they be internal or externally connected) is completed the next thing to test is whether or not a media appliance's networking abilities are up to snuff. This is accomplished by using both small file sized videos with a low bit rate of 480p and then large above 2GB file sized videos with a high bitrate. If a given review item can do wire-less as well as wired streaming, all tests will be run using both abilities.

For Television sets we have settled on three main ones. A 1080p 64 inch rear projection style TV with HDMI capabilities. A 26 inch 720p LCD TV. also with HDMI capabilities and a older 24 inch CRT which does not have HDMI capabilities. Three different sizes, with three different resolutions, all with three different way of displaying an image should show any weakness a given review item has.

To further help show exactly how well a given media appliance performed we have broken up our grading system into three categories: Pass, Fail and Pass w/ Caveats (Issues).

To earn a “Pass” rating, the unit must not only be able to play a given file at a given resolution and format but also do so at watchable levels of Image Quality and display no signs of stuttering, pauses, skipping, macro-blocking, incorrect colour or audio sync issues.

To earn a “Fail” rating, the unit must be unable to physically play a given format or do so poorly at it as to render a file unwatchable.

To earn a “Pass w/ Caveats” a given file should be playable and either watchable or mostly watchable. In the explanation of each chart we will detail what the Caveat was and whether or not it is a serious issue.