Patriot Box Office Media Player Review

A Closer Look at the Patriot Box Office

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.


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)..


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.


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.