In Use

Had a good look at the photos? Good. To get your PBO Core going, you plug it in to your TV (I used an HDMI port), plug it into the wall for some power, and turn it on. Job done. Obviously you'll need some media to play, which can be had from various media such as DVD, USB, internal Hard Drive or Network. You can see how big the PBO Core is, and how little room it takes up in the above picture. The TV is an LG 42LD450 and just look at the size of the PBO Core compared to a Wii. It's smaller by almost half again. And my admittedly larger than most HTPC is the silver item bottom left. You'll have to excuse the decor/mess, I've recently moved house and only done the essentials like getting the TV and HTPC working (I'll do secondary things like carpet and paint later). Would have been a lot quicker to set up with the PBO Core that's for sure.

When you switch on the PBO Core, you'll be presented with a very quick boot up sequence. It takes around 5 seconds from switching the power on to being able to navigate the menu's, which put against most HTPC's is certainly very quick.

When I first powered on the PBO Core, I did feel that the interface image was a little soft and even poorly displayed. It looked like it was a lower resolution than it should have been. And that's because it was. Looking around the setup menu, and changing the output to 1080P 60Hz brought the interface into focus, and gave an excellent sharp image. It's a nice looking GUI too, with a coffee machine business black and brushed silver aluminum look to it.

There are actually quite a lot more options than I expected to find in the PBO Core's setup menus. From 1080P 24Hz playback, to setting preview playback on and off, changing the picture color, brightness and hue, setting parental control PIN, formatting your hard drive (if you're using one) and setting the time (which the PBO Core can get automatically via the Internets, if you're using one).

You can set the PBO Core to your individual preferences … I wouldn't say extensively, but certainly enough to allow you to be a bit individual about it. As long as it's black as Henry Ford would say. Alternatively, you can plug it in, do a minimal amount of setting up (the resolution basically), and start playing your media right away. You can also set the HDMI out to Auto HDMI so if you plan on moving your PBO Core from display to display, you can have the PBO Core auto choose the correct HDMI resolution.

Network setup was extremely painless. Plugging in the Patriot Wireless N USB Adapter gave us a green indication pop up on the screen for a few seconds, and in the settings you can set the wireless network up via PBC or what ever your Router likes to call it.

If like me you prefer to set your network up manually, then you can enter your Network key and other details manually via an onscreen keyboard. The one thing you can't do that I could see was enter an SSID manually, so your WiFi network will need to be visible.

The heart of the interface is the Browser, which allows you to navigate the various functions of the PBO Core. You get the function menus to the left, and a striking PBO Core logo picture to the right. The icons are easily remembered if not the greatest art in the world, and you simply navigate through the different areas left and right, and the individual functions of those areas up and down.

Since at this point I hadn't added any storage media to the PBO Core, I decided to have a quick play with the IMS stuff. So what this is, is Internet Media Services. Video Podcasts, Internet Radio, etc. The PBO Core comes with plenty of streams built in, but you can also add and customize your own feeds. Playback, even from a non HD source, was pretty good for internet video, with the PBO Core doing a pretty good job at up-scaling There is no built in support for Hulu or Netflix or BBC's iPlayer or the like, but you could use TVersity or PlayOn or similar software to get the PBO Core to playback internet streamed content from these services.

The Weather service did actually throw me at first. It's quite simple; you navigate down the various locations until you find one closest to you, at which point your told to press the Option 'i' key to save it as a favorite. And I couldn't find an 'i' key on the remote. Nor an Info key which I assumed the 'i' key would be. Of course, it's actually the Option key which it quite plainly says, but it still took me two attempts to get a favorite saved. I'll let you decide if that was my fault or not. Once it is saved, you can visit here and get info on your local weather for today and tomorrow, as well as a map indicating your location.

At this point I figured I'd look through my home network, and specifically, the files on my HTPC which sort of doubles up as a home media server for the rest of the household. I was a little disappointed that the PBO Core showed not only all of my regular network shares, but also all of the administrative ones which if like me, you have a lot of hard drives/partitions with your media all carefully cataloged can make navigation to the correct share a more involved affair.

I've got quite a collection of media files; MP3's, WMV's, MOV, AVI's MKV's all in various resolutions and bit rates, and I only came across one file I couldn't play (The Elephants Dream HD movie, freely available on the web, in AVI format).

DVD's and files with chapters are supported, so you can jump during playback from title to title, chapter to chapter and even to specific times via a pop up on screen window. This is great, because in the case of most of my TV shows, I've ripped them from DVD to XviD and not bothered with Chapters or anything like that. You can obviously fast forward in increasing increments from 2x up to 32x speed. As you fast forward, you'll get a second of play, complete with sound before it jumps forward to the next section, so you can see clearly where abouts within the video you are while fast forwarding.

The music interface was a little lackluster compared to most other examples if I'm honest. You navigate and choose a directory to load from, or you can play individual files. You get a box for the artwork, and you can see the file data and a progress bar. All the basics, but you can't load or create a playlist so you'll either have to create a separate directory with just the music you want to listen at that time in it, or spend a lot of time with the remote in your hands. Still, for basic playback, it works well enough and is easy to use.

Photo slide-shows on the PBO Core are a lot better than I expected. You can set up various transitions, add the Ken Burns slow movement and zoom effect, dictate how long a picture is on screen for and even choose a folder for some background music. All of this has to be done in the setup menus before you navigate to and look at your pictures. It all works rather well, although I would have liked to have seen a way to sort your images other than by name. By date for example could be useful. I've no doubt that for the majority this won't be an issue and the images displayed were scaled quite well, although I have seen better. The interface itself is the exact same browser as for video media so it's simple enough to use.

Video playback is what most are going to be interested in. Navigation of folders and files of video content gets you a small preview in a window to the right of the file list (if you've enabled this in the setup) which is nice. When you hit OK to select the file, you then start at the beginning of the video media rather than at the point the file was at in the preview box. If you've watched the item previously and were part way through it, you'll be asked if you want to continue playback from that point or start at the beginning.