The Patriot memory Box office is a well designed player capable of playing almost all the Video/Audio formats available today - from DVD-Video (mpeg2) to Blu-Ray movies (Mpeg4 AVC). The player offers tons of features and connectivity options, including wired LAN and Wifi, while it also allows you to install an internal 2.5" HDD to keep all you media contents locally. The available HDMI v1.3 and composite outputs will satisfy everyone and are very usable .

So are we talking about the perfect media player here? Well yes, but there are some features that need to be improved in order to get a perfect experience. In our case the internal fan was making lot of noise, an issue we dealt with and solved it after pulling the power off it. PatriotMemory should revise the cooling mechanism for the player and make it quieter if not silent.

Passing to the video playback performance, we played many video files found around the net, starting from MKV files and also Blu-Ray ISOs we made ourselves. No problem at all for the player - it willingly played them all. Clips with DTS sound are not a problem for the the Box Office player. An exception would be a Dolby Digital+ 7.1 and a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 clip we tried. Both were muted during reproduction. We are not very sure whether it is a hardware limitation of player or it could be fixed with a firmware update.

As you realize, all your favorite TV series and movies can be played without needing to install a costly HTPC near your TV.

Continuing with more features, we saw that the player will quickly resume playback after you stop it for some a reason, while the FF/FR functions work fast and accurately. We noticed some issues with the image stretching function when we tried to play some 1440x1088 p WMV clips from Microsoft's web site. The player did not stretch the image but perhaps this could be improved with a new firmware release.

The player offers a great support for subtitles, although we had some problems with the Greek language. Again, these small issues can be addressed with future software upgrades. Another neat feature is the support for ISO files. You can backup your DVD-Video and Blu-Ray discs to a HDD and playback them perfectly.

We would like to see a better design for the menu as well as and some missing features such as the time remaining when you playback a file, a menu indicating the firmware revision of the device, an automatic firmware update through the internet and perhaps some Web widgets.. While most of these features are not essential for the main operation of the player, they would give the product a special touch. PatriotMemory is always there to improve their products with new firmware updates so keep an eye at their forums!

Overall a great, fully-featured player that offers the efficiency of an HTPC while it remains a compact and stylish device. It's definitely an 'Editor's Choice' product.

Positive

- Small Dimensions
- Full retail package - HDMI cable bundled
- Can playback almost anything from mpeg1,2,4 ASP & AVC formats
- Can playback almost all audio formats (mp3, AAC, Flac, Ogg, WMA, RA)
- 1080p and DTS soundtracks are not a problem for this player
- Supports 2.5" USB HDD installation
- Supports both Wifi and wired local networks
- Generally stable playback
- Supports playback of DVD-Video and Blu-Ray ISOs with menu support
- Built in P2P file download management
- Support for UPnP streaming
- Can be used as a network storage medium after installing a 2.5" HDD

Negative

- The design of the remote control could be better
- Support for Greek subtitles needs some work
- Included fan makes lot of noise unless you disconnect it
- No Internet Widgets
- Menus and overall graphics could have a better design
- Windows 7 sharing needs registry hacks to get everything working
- More information about the reproduced files should be displayed (remaining time, etc...)