Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25 (Black)
by Patriot Memory
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Category: Home Theater
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: Patriot MemoryBrand: Patriot
Edition: Electronics
Model: PCMPBO25
Color: Black
Publisher: Patriot Memory
Studio: Patriot Memory
Music Label: Patriot Memory
Product features:
- All anodized aluminum
- Full 1080p Media Play back
- Support 2.5-Inch HD
- Support H. 264
- Support HDMI
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25 (Black)
Customer Review: An admirable effort, but needs MAJOR improvements
Summary: 3 Stars
I was excited to try out this low-priced media tank because it uses the same Realtek chipset and OS that powers the very capable and inexpensive ASUS O!Play, but now with the added capability of internal storage. This is a huge selling point because it means now you can copy gigs of files and bring just the player over to a friend or relative's house for movie night without having to lug along an external hard drive as well. The PBO offers yet another nice touch -- an all-aluminum housing. Neither of the major contenders in the home media player market offer these features: The Western Digital WD TV Live and both Asus models are plastic and lack internal HDD bays. There's a number of other manufacturers like Popcorn Hour, Brite-View, and A.c. Ryan, but I won't be discussing them.
I own the WD TV Live and both variants of the O!Play. I rated all 3 devices very highly because of their versatility and ease of use. As stated above, the PBO is powered by the same guts that drive the O!Plays, which has proven itself as a solid technology platform. The PBO has all the same playback versatility as the O!Play, but also all the same annoyances. You can read more about the playback capabilities on the O!Play review page (Realtek chip'll play anything you throw at it), so I'll discuss some of the major differences instead.
My reaction to the device is mixed. It certainly is a very capable machine, but it's also very user-unfriendly. Patriot Memory is a newcomer to the home electronics game and it shows. The interface is built around the same homely, boxy, no-frills DOS-looking OS as the O!Plays, but Patriot kicked it down a notch and made it a bit worse. It is less responsive when selecting certain options, klunkier, and even less intuitive. As one example of the unpolished workmanship, the setup menu has a stray white pixel under the menu bar, just floating in space. It doesn't affect the functionality, but it just shows that the engineers didn't exactly go over the product with a fine eye for visuals. I had hoped to be able to give this device to my dad to watch movies and non-English TV shows on, but due to the cumbersome nature of the menus, I cannot.
For starters, the homepage of the device has a row of 3 icons on a spartan black background: COPY, BROWSER, and SETUP. For a home user, they're not going to care about COPY and BROWSER (which Patriot thinks is a verb, by the way). Contrast this with the O!Play, which has All Media, Movies, Photos, Music, On-Line Media, File Copy and Setup, arranged in a rotary configuration all on a bright blue swirly background with very big, easy-to-see icons. This is user-friendly and makes it easy for non-technical users. One level down from this, both devices display ugly black and white text menus, but this is where the PBO gets very very ugly. It shows an alphabet soup of abbreviations: USB, HDD, UPnP, NET, PLAYLIST. This is fine if you're a rather technical user, but not fine if you're an average person. The rest of the setup menus, file directory listings, and popup dialogs (e.g. for subtitles and media metadata like bitrate and current time) are functionally and visually the identical or very similar to the O!Plays. The PBO was definitely designed by programmers and this is the same criticism I have for the O!Play. All the extra layers of complexity and overly technical menus should be removed or streamlined so non-technical people can use this player. Like the O!Plays, the device will perform a mandatory network speed check every time you try to play a movie, which delays response by one or two seconds.
LIKES:
- HDD installation was easy. Only took a few minutes to get the case off, slide the drive in and zip everything back up. 4 screws total. It saw the shared folders on my Mac and had no problems playing back the 720p MKV files, as expected. Unlike many products, this comes with a free HDMI cable.
- I like the Go To function a lot. You can go to any time in the movie. But this comes with a trade-off. The ASUS lets you skip ahead/back in fixed increments of 1/5/10/etc mins (you choose one in the setup) by pushing left or right on the remote, which I frequently use. Oddly, the PBO does not have this feature. You can Fast Forward or Fast Rewind up to 32x (1.5x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 32x), but not skip ahead in increments.
- Another handy feature is the subtitle location and size nudger. If the video has subtitles, Up/Down controls the location of the text. Left/Right controls the size. You can cycle through audio tracks with the AUDIO button, but not subtitles with the SUBTITLE button.
- Like all players I've tested, the PBO remembers the last time you played a file and will offer to resume. This works even after you power off the device.
- One feature I REALLY like and this makes up for a lot of the product's flaws: Being able to connect to the player via SMB. I'm copying over several gigs of TV shows right now directly onto the drive from my iMac. Turn off Login Control and turn on SMB/BT, then login as Guest. This is the easiest way to copy files over. Don't try to do it via the device's menus. With the device's copy system, I have no idea when the transfer will finish. It shows the flying folders animation (Windows users, you know what I'm talking about).
- You can attach an external DVD drive to this, allowing for even greater playback flexibility. I don't have one to test with though.
ME NO LIKE:
Where to begin?... I guess with the atrocious remote. It's a crowded mishmash of small, confusingly arranged buttons. By comparison, the ASUS remote which I also complained about, looks like a work of genius. All the buttons on the PBO remote are the same size (i.e. tiny), giving you no sense of hierarchy, importance, or spatial placement, making every use of the remote a frustrating experience. Without exaggeration, each button is about the size as a lentil (.20 to .25 inches across). The most commonly used buttons are scattered on four corners of the remote. HOME, which gets you back to the main menu, is all the way at the top. Then there's a similar button called BROWSER in the lower third, another confusing button on the opposite side called RETURN, which gets you back to the menu system. This is in addition to STOP which stops playback and goes back to the menu. MUTE is next to 0 on the number pad instead of grouped with VOL + and VOL -. All the buttons feel and look the same and are inadequately spaced for human thumbs, forcing you to look down at the remote every time, not convenient in a dimly-lit room when a movie is playing.
Inexplicably, the ENTER button doubles as a ZOOM button during playback, yet useless when copying. To mark a file for copying, you have to use not the ENTER button, but the tiny SELECT button in the lower right, grouped together with the DVD playback controls.
Next is the awful firmware update support site. It currently lists 7 separate firmware files, with no revision history, feature/bug fix list, or notes. For that, you have to go to their support forum, which now lists 9 firmwares, with confusing explanations about Bootcode version. You have to figure out which bootcode your device has and download the correct firmware. This is not in the System Info display where it should be. Instead, you have to push STOP and PAUSE simultaneously from the device home page. I don't expect much after-purchase support from companies, but one thing I do demand is painless firmware updates. This is pretty basic and Patriot has managed to failed the test. Google "Patriot Box Office firmware" and see if you can make sense of that page and figure out which firmware you need. ASUS is no prize pig (you can't even find them by googling "ASUS O!Play firmware update"), but at least their firmware section is clearly organized by date and version, with a detailed features/bugfix list for each firmware release. There's no potentially device-bricking "bootcode" to worry about. Patriot: Please make just 1 firmware.
I saved the best for last. My unit does not properly power off when I push the POWER button. The TV goes dark and says "No Signal", but all the LEDs on the device are still lit and the fan and hard drive still spinning, even when left in this state for several minutes. Pushing POWER again does not boot the system back up. I have to manually flip the switch on the back of the unit every time I want to turn it on or off. I tested this on two units and neither of them turn off. This is a MAJOR problem.
SUMMARY:
I sounds like I hate this device, but I really don't. It certainly has a sizable share of problems, which you may or may not be willing to tolerate. My rating may improve over time with future firmware releases, but as of now, with the latest firmware installed, I can only recommend this product for those with patience and users really wanting internal HDD storage. Home electronics should be easy to use, and with this, it feels like I'm jumping through hoops. I consider myself a gadgets guy and I found this very cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to use because of the bad remote and excessively layered menus. It lacks the internet TV capabilities of the comparably-priced O!Play and the YouTube/Pandora/Flickr of the more expensive WD TV Live series. WD TV Live Plus, an upgrade to the regular Live, has Netflix support. If you're fine with external USB storage, then I enthusiastically recommend the WD TV Live (or Live Plus), or one of the ASUS players.
With the exception of the remote and maybe the power-down issue, most of this product's problems can be fixed through a firmware update. Patriot just needs to get their act together and hire some usability consultants and address these QA nightmare. I'm looking forward to being able to upgrade my rating.
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Description of Patriot Box Office 1080p High-Definition Media Player PCMPBO25 (Black)
Patriot Box Office High Definition Media Player is an All-In-One Media Player which supports 1080p playback from various files sources such as VOB, H. 264, ISO, WAV, etc.Digital Cameras & Photo Categories
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