Popcorn Hour A-110 HD Networked Media Tank

I've had one of these for three months, and I absolutely love it. It's allowed me to back-up nearly all of my 690-disc DVD collection onto four hard drives and send my discs into storage. Anyone with needs similar to mine should look no further.

BUT, bear the following in mind:

1. The machine is not a typical 'white good'. You can't just plug it in, and "go". It'll take a couple of hours to set up. If you don't have patience for technology, give this a miss... or maybe get a more patient friend to set it up for you!

2. Firmware updates are being released all the time, but it's still a little buggy - of my 303 movie rips, seven of them don't work. And for no apparent reason, either. But, looking on the bright side, 296 of them *do* work. And they work great.

Anyone wanting 'the official line' should check out the official forum:

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I hope you enjoy yours as much as I enjoy mine.

DH.

I have had a few media players in the past and all have had some bad points. But this one I have no complaints at all with. It plays a very wide range of formats from avi, mp4, mkv,iso,img, h264, divx etc the list goes on. Both video and audio are supported very well. So are some internet streaming services just too much to put in a review.

This unit does not have wifi but there is a USB Wifi dongle available also specifically for the A110 HD. Plays from PC's, Media Servers, or Straight from a UPnp NAS drive.

Great product far outweighs the rest.

I recently bought a popcorn hour and must admit it's not a bad device. I purchased it because I wanted a device in which I could back up my files e.g. pics, movies, music and then watch these directly on my Samsung TV without having to stream (since with streaming the connection can timeout you can't fast forward etc....)
Now originally I bought a buffalo linked media station which was great for backing up, however it was let down by the fact it only came with an usb master connection and not a slave connection. Therefore this meant I could only stream files to my TV and not watch them directly from the hard rive (what in my opinion is a bad idea).

Therefore after much searching online to see something that could fulfil my needs I stumbled across media centres. After doing much research on this topic I decided to go with the popcorn hour mainly because I liked the custom UI on the application. I managed to pick one up in the end with a pre-fitted hard drive of 500 GB for approx £180 (not bad I thought).

Now to set-up this device is quite easy, unbox, plug in power, and then hook-up to your TV via usb, component or hdmi. I choose HDMI, I then connected the popcorn hour to my laptop via usb (since this device acts as a slave) and it immediately recognised the device from which I was able to transfer 2 movies over without any problems. The files played perfectly on the TV via the popcorn hour. I then proceeded to start to transfer files wirelessly using a FTP software. Prior to doing this you will need to format the hardrive otherwise you will not be able to map a network drive or create a FTP connection. Now this unit has come under criticism in regards to this however FTP is not difficult. In most case all you do is type in the ip address, user name and password (which is supplied in the manual) and you're ready to go. You select the files on your PC/Laptop and then choose the directories you want on your popcorn hour (you need a harddrive fitted and these directories are normally Video, Pictures, Music, Download) and then select transfer and of you go. The FTP software then transfers all of the files over. Now here is where there were some issues, the PCH could handle Music and Pictures without any problems however it struggled with Videos, therefore if you were going to transfer videos wirelessly I would suggest in purchasing a Home Plug Network. What this will do is it will create a wired connection via your electricity to enable you to have a internet connection. Once I plugged in the Home Plug network I was then able to transfer over 50GB worth files over night.
Also as I said the device comes with a usb slave so I was able to select my files on my external hardrive and play these through the popcorn hour as well, which means if you don't want to wait 90 mins (this is for blu ray films) for a file to transfer you can copy it to usb and plug it in.

Photo wise the item is fine to display pics and normally the picture is sharp and images vivid.

Music wise it's not the best however it can be changed by using some additional software. Now this is one good thing about the box, if you are an above average tech then you can customise the look and feel of the popcorn hour box by creating index.htmls etc.... There are plenty of network forums in regards to this.

I would say from a distance the item looks good, however on close up it's a little bit to metal for me (I might change to the A200 which is more plastic).

Therefore overall I would say I'm quite happy with the item and would recommend this to all except mac users who live in mac world