NZXT DOKO box offers a pure HTPC experience

[Shawn Knight]

For the better part of the last decade, enthusiasts have been working to solve the riddle of how best to bring the PC experience to the living room. After all, early HTPCs were born out of the desire to watch movies on a television.

The industry has been quite receptive to the concept. So much so, in fact, that we’ve witnessed a colossal shift in the way media is presented and consumed that has networks and cable providers absolutely terrified.

But somewhere along the way, the core concept of a HTPC was lost.

NZXT is hoping to revitalize the true spirit of the HTPC with its latest offering. The DOKO box is a simplistic media player whose primary job is to display what your PC is doing on your television. Want to watch a movie, surf the web, view photos from your recent vacation or check your e-mail? DOKO has you covered.

The set-top box, which uses a wired Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi, can stream content from your PC to TV at 1080p quality albeit at only 30 frames per second. This limitation is in place because of the way the DOKO works: software installed on your PC compresses the video signal before sending it over to the box for decompression and display.

Trusted Reviews recently spent some time with the device and found that it’s adequate for pretty much everything except serious gaming and watching videos as the frame rate is just too choppy to be enjoyable.

As is, for $100, it’s still one of the easiest ways to bring your entire desktop PC experience to the living room without physically having to move it. The setup process is uber easy, too, we’re told. Perhaps with a bit more oomph under the hood (it’s powered by a Wonder Media 8750 SoC), it could handle heavier-duty video content.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/59398-nzxt-doko-box-offers-pure-htpc-experience.html

 

[madboyv1]

I'm confused. This is, for all intents and purpose, a screen sharing peripheral, where one of the big points is to watch movies from your PC to your TV or whatever the DOKO is attached. However, because of the limited framerate and encode/decode lag that can potentially produce audio desync, it's not suited for watching video?

That aside, I could see it's usefulness as a tool for presentations, say it is a display that you routinely go to for that big meeting and instead of dealing with connecting your computer to said display, you could stream it to it. But there are numerous options to do that, some of which even built into some TVs.

I'm having difficulty finding the appeal of the product, I would much rather have a standalone product that can output at a better framerate.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Great, but I've never had the urge to move my desktop PC experience to the TV in the living room and I never will so I guess this gadget is moot for me.

 

[Guest]

I use a HDMI cable to see my computer screen on the TV...

 

[Burty117]

I'm confused, all DVD's, Blu-Rays and digital downloads of movies are 24fps? So surely the 30fps isn't an issue really? The default fps on YouTube and most sites is 30fps or less.

Sure, hardcore gaming I can see being a problem, but most consoles run games at 30fps so it'd be like having a slightly better console experience?

 

[Guest]

If it needs Ethernet then yeah just run it and convert HDMI? If not raspberry pi is a reasonable player and looks like out performs too for a htpc experience build one. Looks like it will make a nice mobile phone charging station tho

 

[Tekkaraiden]

So it steams video content from my pc, so what part of that is a HTPC?

 

[hahahanoobs]

Should change the name to Dookie, because this thing is a piece of ****.

 

[Guest]

I have just finished setting up kodi on an old Z68 pc I stuck into a GD08 case.
It's runs totally silent on a passive cpu cooler with a nice remote control for all operations, holds all the hdd's I will ever need and as a plus I found out I can use my WD TV Live linked to it by ethernet and play everything over network shares. It works flawlessly!
So the WD TV Live is now heading to the living room to serve the family with over 4TB of high quality movies without the fear of my kids not ejecting or damaging a usb hdd.
Oh and the 100's of blu rays and dvd's we own are being boxed up and put away into the loft, yay!

 

[Burty117]

I have just finished setting up kodi on an old Z68 pc I stuck into a GD08 case.
It's runs totally silent on a passive cpu cooler with a nice remote control for all operations, holds all the hdd's I will ever need and as a plus I found out I can use my WD TV Live linked to it by ethernet and play everything over network shares. It works flawlessly!
So the WD TV Live is now heading to the living room to serve the family with over 4TB of high quality movies without the fear of my kids not ejecting or damaging a usb hdd.
Oh and the 100's of blu rays and dvd's we own are being boxed up and put away into the loft, yay!

What software are you using to convert your Blu-rays and DVD's to files? I kinda want to do the same thing but I haven't found any decent software yet :/

 

[captaincranky]

What software are you using to convert your Blu-rays and DVD's to files? I kinda want to do the same thing but I haven't found any decent software yet :/

Have you tried DVD Fab? Google that. They even have a player to mount DVD Blu-Ray images (.iso) Early Nero, (I have 6.0), used to mount DVD from a Video-TS folder. That's something WMP or VLC won't do. (To the best of my knowledge) Having said that, Nero won't let you rip a protected DVD.

 

[Burty117]

Have you tried DVD Fab? Google that. They even have a player to mount DVD Blu-Ray images (.iso) Early Nero, (I have 6.0), used to mount DVD from a Video-TS folder. That's something WMP or VLC won't do. (To the best of my knowledge) Having said that, Nero won't let you rip a protected DVD.

Awesome, I like the sound of it, It really annoys me how hard they make it to rip a DVD or Blu-ray to file. Specially I'm after keeping the quality up image wise and surround sound wise.