bargain home theater find, patriot box office..

[bubbagump]

Just thought I'd share a product find I'm really happy about. Check out the Patriot Box Office (this isn't an ad, I have no affiliation with this company).

http://www.patriotmemory.com/product...id=895&type=20

Look around and with rebate, it can be had for less than 100 bucks. There are similar products from Asus, Brite View,Western Digital, Popcorn Hour and others but I feel the Patriot edges them out, at least for the time being and especially at this price point.

It's about the size of a internal optical drive for a desktop. It will playback virtually any format you can think of and many you probably haven't. It outputs via hdmi 1.3, toslink and component. It was easy to set up and connect to my wireless network with the optional ~15 dollar wifi dongle. It has two six pin usb connectors and a four pin which can be used to connect directly to my pc which sees it as a ums device (I installed a 2.5" hard drive). It doesn't come with a hard drive but installing one isn't necessary. You can use any flash drive, external hard drive, flash cards with an adapter and so on. It's firmware upgradeable, has a built in BitTorrent client and other nice features. Best of all is the quality of the video playback. I have an oppo 981hd connected to a 40" Samsung lcd and can't tell the difference between it and the Box Office in picture quality when playing back vob rips of dvd's. It's not perfect. The UI is a little bit unintuitive, you'llneed to read the manual but overall, I don'tr know of any other home theater product that solves this many problems at a price point anyone can afford. Great product.

[blackraven]

Very cool product. Too bad it does not come with the HD. I may buy a couple for my kids.