AkG
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2007
- Messages
- 5,270
Video & Audio Performance
Due to the fact all three resolutions gave less than perfect, but still generally decent results we feel comfortable giving this unit a Pass but there are some minor issues.
While we gave MKV a pass rating, one thing worth noting is that MKVs with high reference frame rates will result in a failure to play. However, we are giving it a pass since if you encode MKV with a higher than normal amount of frame rates you would have issues playing it on a Blu Ray player or darn near any non PC media appliance. Put another way, the Box Office has the same MKV compatibility as Blu-Ray player in that both appliances support only (up to) Level 4 of H.264 and not the newer Level 5. What this means is that max reference frames is 4 @ 1920×1080 and 9 @ 1280×720.
This unit does NOT like down converting PAL videos however. This is not limited to MKV and regardless of the video format resulted in a downright UGLY picture with horrible aliasing happening on all straight lines. This occurred on both the 480P and 720P televisions but did not occur when using the 1080P television. Turing off sharpening did not help. If we were to theorize why this occurs, it would be because the Box Office’s Realtek chipset is not powerful enough to handle both down converting the resolution AND up-converting from 25 frames per second to 29.97 frames per second. However, there were no audio sync issues and it did play the files, just not anywhere nearly well enough for our liking. This is a minor issue at best, as most people using NTSC TV’s will be using NTSC files.
WMV resulted in a Pass w/ Caveats as only WMV 9 is supported. We are not a fan of WMV formats and to our way of thinking this is not a big deal. If you have a large library of pre WMV 9 files you may want to consider this a “Fail”.
When it came to ISO support, things are spotty at best since the Box Office will play them, but if you start a movie you will not be able to get back to the menu main and if you stop watching you will not be able to resume. The other caveat is your ISO cannot have any DRM attached to it or it will not work.
The reason we gave so many “Pass w/ Caveat” on the 1080P results is due to the fact this unit cannot do any up-converting. As the old saying goes: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, but this does put the Box Office at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the Western Digital TV Live which can do some basic up-converting. However, the picture quality while not great was still decent when watching 480P files on the 720P television and 720P on the 1080P TV.
To be honest, the biggest reason why Patriot’s media player got an overall Pass w/ Caveat has to do with the Patriot Box Office's less than optimal handling of audio when in RAW. While in theory yes, you can set the unit to SPDIF Raw, we did have numerous issues with NO sound unless we set the unit to SPDIF LPCM. It did not seem to make any difference whether the audio stream was 5.1 or stereo sound, as sometimes it just needed to be in LPCM to work. TV series were the worst offenders for this, but even the occasional movie required us to change from RAW to LCPM. Needless to say we are less than blown away by the Box Office’s audio handling capabilities.
With that being said it really does depend on how you plan on using this device. For many of the intended customers its performance will be more than good enough. Let's face it the intended audience is not 5.1 (or 7.1) home theaters setups but more than likely a TV with whatever speakers come attached to it. In that case, you will have absolutely no problems with audio as both LCPM modes and composite audio worked perfectly.
Video Performance
Due to the fact all three resolutions gave less than perfect, but still generally decent results we feel comfortable giving this unit a Pass but there are some minor issues.
While we gave MKV a pass rating, one thing worth noting is that MKVs with high reference frame rates will result in a failure to play. However, we are giving it a pass since if you encode MKV with a higher than normal amount of frame rates you would have issues playing it on a Blu Ray player or darn near any non PC media appliance. Put another way, the Box Office has the same MKV compatibility as Blu-Ray player in that both appliances support only (up to) Level 4 of H.264 and not the newer Level 5. What this means is that max reference frames is 4 @ 1920×1080 and 9 @ 1280×720.
This unit does NOT like down converting PAL videos however. This is not limited to MKV and regardless of the video format resulted in a downright UGLY picture with horrible aliasing happening on all straight lines. This occurred on both the 480P and 720P televisions but did not occur when using the 1080P television. Turing off sharpening did not help. If we were to theorize why this occurs, it would be because the Box Office’s Realtek chipset is not powerful enough to handle both down converting the resolution AND up-converting from 25 frames per second to 29.97 frames per second. However, there were no audio sync issues and it did play the files, just not anywhere nearly well enough for our liking. This is a minor issue at best, as most people using NTSC TV’s will be using NTSC files.
WMV resulted in a Pass w/ Caveats as only WMV 9 is supported. We are not a fan of WMV formats and to our way of thinking this is not a big deal. If you have a large library of pre WMV 9 files you may want to consider this a “Fail”.
When it came to ISO support, things are spotty at best since the Box Office will play them, but if you start a movie you will not be able to get back to the menu main and if you stop watching you will not be able to resume. The other caveat is your ISO cannot have any DRM attached to it or it will not work.
The reason we gave so many “Pass w/ Caveat” on the 1080P results is due to the fact this unit cannot do any up-converting. As the old saying goes: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, but this does put the Box Office at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the Western Digital TV Live which can do some basic up-converting. However, the picture quality while not great was still decent when watching 480P files on the 720P television and 720P on the 1080P TV.
Audio Performance
To be honest, the biggest reason why Patriot’s media player got an overall Pass w/ Caveat has to do with the Patriot Box Office's less than optimal handling of audio when in RAW. While in theory yes, you can set the unit to SPDIF Raw, we did have numerous issues with NO sound unless we set the unit to SPDIF LPCM. It did not seem to make any difference whether the audio stream was 5.1 or stereo sound, as sometimes it just needed to be in LPCM to work. TV series were the worst offenders for this, but even the occasional movie required us to change from RAW to LCPM. Needless to say we are less than blown away by the Box Office’s audio handling capabilities.
With that being said it really does depend on how you plan on using this device. For many of the intended customers its performance will be more than good enough. Let's face it the intended audience is not 5.1 (or 7.1) home theaters setups but more than likely a TV with whatever speakers come attached to it. In that case, you will have absolutely no problems with audio as both LCPM modes and composite audio worked perfectly.
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