The PBO Alpine is a player I was waiting to get my hands on from the first pre-release reviews. I payed around $100 or so about 7-8 mos ago. The player itself is very small and light (tends to tip back from weight of HDMI cord). The interface is OK and the Alpine does play just about any media you throw at it.
The negative issues include complete lack of support for this device. The firmware to fix a bunch of annoying issues was promised about 6 months ago and forum members are still waiting. There has been no update from Patriot staff and in fact they deleted whole post topics on the Patriot Alpine Forum, when users were complaining about issues and lack of updates and company support. I was a regular poster there and have seen lost of peoples posts disappear recently. Patriot staff do not respond to inquiries about matrix firmware that was promised ages ago, and if you complain your post will mysteriously disappear. This player has promise but will never be what it should until someone outside patriot writes a decent ROM for it. Biggest issue will be seen by anyone who has a lot of video files. The videos are all randomly ordered, you can't search them, and without a fix one of the forum admins posted, you can't even read the whole file name, only the first word or two. This means that any episodes of a series are displayed where you can't tell which one you are looking at. Do you have any directories with a few hundred files? I do. Get ready to scroll through them one by one until you find the one you are looking for. You can't jump pages, you'll have to scroll at a snails pace through hundreds of videos until you get fed up and use another player. I'm boycotting Patriot products for the time being, due to very unprofessional forum policies and complete lack of support or communication with customers. lopaka
