so it seems like everyone's coming out with one of these media extender devices
these days and we have a really intriguing one today from Patriot it's
called the box office and I'm going to have the cameraman have a look at the
side but I'll give you a couple key specs of this guy right off the bat
first of all you've got rmvb support just like the ASUS oplay and it is using
the same chipset if you want to check out my unboxing on the oplay uh you
should click the link okay so other features that it's got it has Network
support but and let's start getting this thing open here you've also got support
much like the popcorn hour to put a
drive inside so you can actually open up the unit itself and pop in a 2 and 1/2
in drive so that means that you can store media on it you can store media on
a USB device and plug it in or you can store media over the network and play it
that way now this is a pre-production sample so it's not going to be perfect
in terms of the retail packaging and I've been informed that they actually
may be changing the finish on the top to more like a matte finish instead of a
brushed finish but let's have a look at the unit itself anyway so I want to
compare it quickly in size to the wdtv so it's a little bit bigger it's a
little bit wider uh but it's about the same height and it's kind of it's
overall I'd say similar in size once you put it on your shelf so at the front
we've got the USB port we've got the IR receiver for the remote which is
actually really impressive more on that later then we've got a USB and hard
drive signaling lights power and the land signal this is a full HD device so
it supports 1080 that means MKV all that
good stuff but you should probably have a look at uh the side of the box you can
just pause and read that if you so desire okay so on the back we have I'm
assuming these are composite but until I get this off I won't know for sure yes
we have composite video output and audio then we have optical audio out we've got
HDMI supporting 5.1 or 7.1 audio we've
actually got a power switch and a lot of these devices don't have a power switch
if you want to turn it off you have to just unplug it here is a USB plug now
this is different from a normal USB plug in that you can actually use this device
as an external 2 and 1/2 in hard drive so that means you don't actually even
have to have a network attachment to it you throw the hard drive inside you plug
into here and then you can just drag and drop files from your desktop onto the
hard drive inside now this one is for an external hard drive that plugs in that
you would put next to the unit this is a 1000 land port and then you've got your
power port so you know what let's uh let's really quickly take out the take
off the cover here and I'm going to show you exactly how the hard drive goes
inside now I haven't seen this yet so
this may be a bit of a surprise for me also this is a Pick Quick screwdriver if
you want to see my unboxing for it click the link yeah that's right you can watch
other videos of me unboxing stuff as well so let's see how this works oh
there we go that was easy so here is the inside of the unit
so first of all we've got what appears to be a 40 mm cooling fan so that's
going to be cooling the chipset which is underneath there as well as some of the
power delivery circuitry we can see you can see at the front we've got our uh
our infrared thingamajiggy we've got our USB and then there's all of our
indicator lights up here you can see we've got what is that so that's some
kind of that's must be the power input right there no no it's not what is that
H well I'm not going to guess here's the power switch though so there you go
there's the wiring for that and then here is your SATA interface so this
accepts a SATA 2.5 in drive and you just
put four no two screws in the sides one here and one here and then you seal it
right back up it's just two screws to pop the unit open that is pretty cool
okay so now let's have a look at the accessory package that comes with this
media player I'll just pull the box out here all right so accessory
package first of all you'll notice it comes with a 6t HDMI cable that's a
pretty good add-on actually I like to see that because a lot of these devices
are only coming with composite and component cables speaking of composite
there it is you got a composite cable as well then you have a USB cable so this
is the one that you're going to need it's USB a to mini B that's what you
need to just plug it into your computer and drag and drop files now you've got
some batteries they are ignite hopefully they don't
ignite it's not very funny actually uh then you've got a power
brick okay pretty straightforward and that brings us to the remote actually
this remote is very impressive compared to some of the other remotes we've seen
in a similar price point so you've got full number pad you got your power
switch home button apparently Patriots actually done a lot of work on the
firmware with this device compared to sort of the stock units you can buy um
you've got all of your uh volume control
pause play all that kind of stuff you can navigate the menus here and then
you've actually got a bunch of really cool stuff down here instant replay
repeat angle copy so that's uh I'm not
100% sure what that's for but either way it looks like a pretty fully featured
remote and I'm really glad to see that especially on such a lowcost device next
we've got screws so these are for attaching the hard drive and then
finally at the bottom we find the quick installation guide so that basically
shows you oh okay so it starts on the
back side okay so first of all you got your package contents which we already
saw we've got the device layout which we've already seen and then it basically
shows you connect the media to your TV initiate the media player okay and then
plug in the USB external hard drive or flash drive to the media player okay it
must be pretty simple to set up or I'm thinking they would have a more detailed
quick start guide so there's your full user manual you can always throw that in
your computer if you're having trouble thank you for checking out my video blog
on the Patriot box office