Patriot Box Office Media Player Review

The User Interface In Depth

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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.