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.