The included remote control, seen in Figure 8, is used for all on-screen menu choices. The circular keypad is used for most choices with the center button used to confirm the choices.

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Figure 8: The remote control.

Figure 9 shows the bottom of the remote control has a more detailed selection of keys including slow, option, cm skip, confirm, repeat, angle, copy, select, eject, title, ins replay, and menu. Above these keys you will see a browse key, as well as a return key. This selection of keys gives you an idea of the many options that are available with the Box Office.

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Figure 9: The remote control selection keys.

In many ways the Patriot Box Office works like several other media servers of this type including the Asus O!Play HD Media Player. One place where it is different is that there is a place inside of the Box Office for an internal 2.5” SATA solid state or hard disk drive, shown in Figure 10.

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Figure 10: The internal hard drive bay.

To install the SATA hard drive, you simply remove the two screws holding the cover and slide it off. Then you attach and secure the hard drive and reinstall the cover.

One nice thing is that installing the hard disk drive is optional. If you don’t want to add one, you can play back media through a connected USB storage device or from the Internet via the built-in 10/100 LAN connection. You can also hook the Box Office up wirelessly, but to do so, you have to purchase any optional Patriot USB 802.11g Wi-Fi adapter.

Our Box Office was a pre-production unit and we didn’t have a Wi-Fi adapter to try. We were disturbed by the fact that the fan in our Box Office had a definite hum. It was quite faint, but noticeable. Although some other equipment like the Xbox can be quite loud, we would have preferred a completely silent device.

Once the Box Office is set up, you can use it to play High Definition video on your TV.  The device can output HD video up to 1080p. You can preview video and control playback with fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan. It also has support for subtitles.

The Box Office can also be used to listen to music. It has options for fast forward, rewind, pause, repeat and shuffle. You can also use the Box Office to view images on your TV. It allows you to create custom slide shows and zoom and pan on each image.

The Box Office really has a lot of functionality. You can use it to copy, and/or move files between sources. For instance, you can easily copy or move files between the hard drive to the USB drive. It also has support for  UPnP streaming, so you can use it with UPnP capable devices such as Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox.

 Playing high definition media on a high definition television produced excellent results. The Box Office also supports Dolby Digital, DTS surround sound, and 5.1/7.1 channel surround. In fact, the more we investigated the device, the more functionality we found. Although we didn’t test it, we found that the Box Office can even be used for Internet video streaming with 3rd party software.

Another nice feature of the Box Office is that it has built-in support for the most popular media formats including JPEG, BMP, PNG, WMA, MP3, RA, H.264, ISO, VOB, DivX, xVid, MKV, MOV, MPEG, AVI and several others.

In our tests, the Box Office performed admirably, producing good results with many different file formats. It will, of course, not work with copy-protected files and we had trouble playing a few AVI files. We also found that only the newest Windows Media files played correctly, but other than that, everything played well.