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spezticle
November 14th, 2011, 05:55 AM
Does anybody have this device?
I'm looking for opinions and that sort of thing. I've been reading reviews and all kinds of things for the last few hours it's all starting to grey together. It seems pretty bad ***. Apparently it can play practically any format. You can plug in a usb disk drive, and can be outfitted with a SATA HDD or SSD and can be, from what i've read, relatively easy to mod/hack and it's only $79 on amazon.
really?
am i missing something because it seems too good to be true.

http://www.patriotmemory.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=6&catid=69&prodgroupid=159&id=895
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Office-High-Definition-Player-PCMPBO25/dp/B002Q4U9PY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321245474&sr=8-1

radkins2
November 14th, 2011, 07:18 AM
Does anybody have this device?
I'm looking for opinions and that sort of thing. I've been reading reviews and all kinds of things for the last few hours it's all starting to grey together. It seems pretty bad ***. Apparently it can play practically any format. You can plug in a usb disk drive, and can be outfitted with a SATA HDD or SSD and can be, from what i've read, relatively easy to mod/hack and it's only $79 on amazon.
really?
am i missing something because it seems too good to be true.

http://www.patriotmemory.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=6&catid=69&prodgroupid=159&id=895
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Office-High-Definition-Player-PCMPBO25/dp/B002Q4U9PY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321245474&sr=8-1

My buddy has one. He likes it a lot.

Lucradia
November 14th, 2011, 08:34 AM
With support for todays most popular media formats (H.264,ISO, VOB, DivX, xVid, MKV, MOV, MPEG and more)

](*,)

3rdalbum
November 14th, 2011, 01:35 PM
Oh yeah, there's heaps of these devices on the market. Hundreds of different brands and models. I personally wouldn't even look at one that can't play media from a networked drive; that way you can put all your videos onto a NAS or home server and play them from multiple media boxes on your network.

The most important thing when looking for a media box, is media format support - lots of it.

The second-most important thing is the user interface. It should be responsive, and not forget your wireless settings or anything like that. And it must be stable and not likely to crash.

My current media boxes are Astone units. They've got excellent format support and do networking (even wireless, with a special adapter), but they fail in user interface speed, their tendency to crash and their occasional desire to forget wireless connection settings.

drawkcab
November 14th, 2011, 06:50 PM
I think it comes down to whether you want to get by with something like this which obviously does a lot for the price or just bite the bullet and construct an htpc. I dropped $300 on my htpc which doubles as my home server and I don't regret it. The extra cost was justified in the sense that it allowed me to abandon cable.

forrestcupp
November 14th, 2011, 07:19 PM
I don't know about this one, but I just bought a similar product from Western Digital, called the WDTV Live Plus. It was around the same price. The only thing PBO has that WDTV Live Plus doesn't is built in WIFI, but I have mine plugged into the router right next to it. Also, you can get a USB WIFI adapter for it. But it looks like WDTV can do more internet related stuff than the PBO. WDTV supports Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus, and a lot more OOTB.

I love my WDTV Live Plus. I have an external USB drive hooked up to it with all of my DVDs dumped onto it. It works great, and it networks well with my other computers. I can play videos from the external on my laptop through the network.


](*,)
You must not understand. These devices can take either an ISO of a DVD or the VOB files from a video DVD and play them. I've ripped the VOB contents of a DVD folder to my hard drive, and my WDTV can play it just like inserting a DVD, menus and all. I can't speak for the PBO, but that's how my WDTV works. It can read an ISO of a DVD and play it, too.

BHEJU
November 14th, 2011, 08:07 PM
I have been using this PBO for a while now. I like it. I have connected a USB wifi to one of two USB ports and it connects to my network share. I run most of my media via Wifi. Sometimes I use USB flash drive. It plays all the formats I have thrown at it. There were some files which it didn't play properly as they were partially corrupted (however, VLC played them but not all the players like movieplayer, banshee etc).
If you get it for good price, I think it's worth it.

Cheers,

forrestcupp
November 16th, 2011, 02:28 PM
I have been using this PBO for a while now. I like it. I have connected a USB wifi to one of two USB ports and it connects to my network share.

If you have to buy a wifi adapter separately, then it looks like it doesn't have anything on the WDTV Live Plus. If you haven't already bought one, I would do some research on the PBO, WDTV Live Plus, and also Roku. Compare them all and weigh the pluses and minuses before just buying the first thing you saw. They are all comparable in price.

I love my WDTV Live Plus, but I've heard Roku supports Amazon Prime video streaming, which the others don't. I don't know about Roku's other features, though.

BHEJU
November 16th, 2011, 10:17 PM
Well.. It depends on the deal you get.. When I got my PBO, it was a very good deal. and the N cofig wifi cost me less than 10 bucks. So, it was better than WD for me. It might turn out diff for you.

Cheers,

spezticle
November 19th, 2011, 11:14 AM
Well, i've given the pbo a shot. ordered it form amazon and so far it's sort of nice. it has a simple interface, it plays media from any usb attached device easy and pretty seamlessly. getting it to play from a media server is a headache though. i've been messing around with it for the last 5 hours and i can only get it to work in windows / homegroup sharing. I don't know if I'm setting up the media server in linux wrong or not but i'm really getting sick of it.

maybe I will ship it back to amazon and get the wd live instead.

i'm not so interested in the wireless connection. hooking up with ethernet cables isn't a problem at all for my setup.