Patriot PBO Alpine Android 2.2 Full 1080p Media Player 2.5IN HDD Support USB HDMI Dolby Digital DTS

Comment:
This should be "1" star review, but the review form would only let me select  "3" stars.Generally a terrible product. But here are my biggest complaints:1. The small remote is terrible.2. Unit is very unresponsive. Very slow to navigate the menu system.3. Movie listing only shows the first number of characters of file names, often making it impossible to know which file to select . 4. Old version of android (2.2) making access to useful utilities very limited. 5. Lithium battery in the remote is short lived (< 4 months for me) 6. Very slow to power up - minutes.7. Doesn't remember network share mapping. You're forced to go through several screens to remap a network drive each time. Since the interface and remote are very unresponsive, this makes the whole experience excruciating!!!8. Android NetFlix application doesn't work.There are more complaints (many more), but these are the big ones for me.NOTE: NCIX, the form rejected my invoice # (purchased the unit from your Markham store) which is why I couldn't enter a "1" star review. This is a silly constraint IMO.

Comment:
I bought this to replace dvd players. The 2 ports can take a usb hub, and I have 2x7 = 14 available thumb drive slots working now.It does (now) play .mp4, .mkv video for me nicely.But....This is an obviously incomplete release of firmware. 5 minutes of using it shows defects that have to be worked around or lived with.The credit remote is hard to use and doesn't support all the functions like fast forward,reverse or display position or length of show.All my .mp4 were stuttering. This was a show stopper. 5 firmware and order of upgrade seemed to matter and the stutter was fixed. But the stutter kept coming back every few days and I spent hours playing with firmware. Forum couldn't help and weeks latter I find out the date gets clobbered and if you reset it manually the stutter is fixed. Knowing that saved hours of firmware re-installs.An example of annoying bugs in the system...The small remote would not turn the unit on sometimes and the unit had to be re-powered. That cost me a trip to the store and a remote battery to figure out. I got the full remote and it has always worked ok for power.Audio (books) over 20 minutes get their positions misrepresented to the point that it is hard to continue from where you left off.You have to select  video or audio at the top level, the next level is the device, then you get the directory to browse for that type of media. But the audio sometimes won't let you change the device from what you had been video watching. You have to select  video, then the device, then go back and select  audio.They need to add a "video&audio" option so you see both file types, but that is just a wish list item.I have avoided hooking up to the internet because I have seen issues reported with that too, and I would have to buy additional hardware.I would summarize by saying the shows seem to play ok, but the interface to them is broken badly and needs to be fixed.

Comment:
This is a very frustrating piece of equipment. When you finally get through the brutal user interface to the list of shows you want to watch, the font diplaying the name is so large you can't even read the name or episode #. You have to watch the preview to figure it out. Then there is only FF/RW, no frames or chapters. Fortunately if you throw the remote in disgust it is so small it won't hurt anything you hit.

Comment:
Bought this to put in my living room and access file shares over my network server. It sees the computer (running XP Pro) and sees all the shared folders that are available, but when I try to connect to it, I get an "out of memory" error every time. Tried connecting manually, and still got the problem. Tried everything else I could find on the web, including a few suggestions from the ncix forum, but still doesn't work. Waiting on my RMA to go through the system and am sending back.Also, I have the other Patriot Box Office which works great! No problems with accessing anything I want it to. Was very dissapointed when the Alpine turned out to be junk for my purposes.