Setup and Installation
Setup and Installation
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).
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.
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.
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.