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The Patriot Box Office (PBO) is a portable media player that will play a variety of media files from a network, USB drive or internal Hard Drive. I bought this to replace a dead XBOX with XBMC that was used to play movies, TV shows and music streamed from my PC.

The PBO costs as little as $69.99 (much less if you look around and include the $25 mail in rebate) and at this price I was actually a little curious, even concerned with what it would be like. After seeing a few reviews including a 4/5 avg star rating from 255+ reader reviews on Newegg I figured it has to be decent at the least!

The PBO is very small and portable and when I took it out of the box for the first time I was floored with the build quality. The unit is actually cased in a very thick, solid brushed aluminum enclosure. The PBO has a variety of I/O options. First and foremost it has the all important network jack. This is the most important feature for me as I intent to share the large media collection off my PC. It's also got not 1, not 2, but 3 total USB ports! Two of the USB ports are for plugging in external hard drives, jump drives or a USB wireless adapter. Because there are two full sized USB ports you can plug an external drive AND a wireless adapter at the same time! The 3rd mini USB port is for accessing an optionally installed 2.5" SATA Hard Drive. The PBO doesn't require a Hard Drive to function but if you want you can install any 2.5" SATA Hard Drive for internal storage. Finally for output options it has standard Composite Stereo AV jacks, HDMI (It even came with an HDMI cable included!) and TOSLINK SPDIF optical audio. Unfortunately it doesn't have S-Video or Component output but I can see where they're coming from. These days most people who have an HDTV will have a modern LCD or Plasma with HDMI and if not they give you Composite just in case.

The included remote is nice and it does have a lot of buttons but in all honestly many of them aren't arranged logically on the remote. You really have to look for some of the basic buttons. It's not the worst remote I've ever seen. But sometimes having more buttons isn't always better. I just think some of the main buttons could have been grouped together to make them easier to use in the dark when watching a movie. Many of the buttons are for DVD playback because the PBO will play DVD video from an ISO file complete with the DVD menu structure.

Compared to the XBOX with XBMC there are certainly some pros and cons. The menu system on the PBO is very limited, slow and cumbersome compared to XBMC. When you have a large list of media files to sort through it becomes a chore to get through the list and find the movie you want. XBMC could show much more files on screen at a time, the page up and down functions would fly over pages in a second while showing the current alphabetical position and even showing cover art for all the movies! Not only did you get the cover art but you could get IMDB like information showing the plot summary, actors and average ratings! In contrast the PBO is very basic, you only see about 6 files on screen at a time so you have to scroll through large lists at a much slower pace. It just doesn't compare to the amazing interface of the XBOX and XBMC.

But on the flip side it plays more modern formats and supports higher resolutions than the XBOX/XBMC! So far the PBO has played every movie I've thrown at it! It's played several movies that the XBOX/XBMC couldn't play including a 720p Bluray rip of Terminator Salvation and a few 480P DVD rips in MKV. The XBOX was simply too slow to play these files smoothly but on the PBO they worked great!

Overall I can highly recommend the PBO to anyone looking for a small, stand alone media player. The simple fact is while the menu system can't compete with the graphical rendering power of a computer (or XBOX) it does what it's supposed to do. It plays a large variety of media formats! The build quality is exceptional, the remote is decent and includes the full array of DVD playback features and it even comes with an HDMI cable! The fact is has multiple USB ports and an internal 2.5" SATA bay put it a step above the competing WD My Live HD Plus media player witch will generally cost a little more. Now, I'm not saying this is the best portable stand alone media player but at the same time I'm not going to compare this to others like the Popcorn Hour players that cost 2-3 times the price! The simple fact is that you can not find any other media player with the same features and I/O capabilities (multiple USB, SATA Hard Drive bay) for the same price. It's really that simple folks, at $70 or LESS it's impossible NOT to recommend the Patriot Box Office!