Popcorn Hour is a great product and loved by many nerds. But that’s just it, the device is somewhat nerdy. Apparently the maker, Syabas, has another Internet-connected device coming and it will be shown off at CES 2010. While certain key points are missing right now like the price, availability, and hardware specs, what little info I do have makes this box sound promising indeed. → Read More
Yippee! Syabas’s newest Popcorn Hour was announced this morning, the Popcorn C-200. Building on the success of the Popcorn Hour A-110, the C-200 now supports Blu-ray playback, gigabit Ethernet and a more powerful and faster Sigma chip (SMP8643). → Read More
I had forgotten how impressive this little thing is. To be honest, I don’t see any reason to go with any other media box, AppleTV included. This thing costs less than two Benjamins and supports more formats and hardware out of the box than other media things can even dream of. If I owned a TV I’d definitely have one of these. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that it’s getting an upgrade. The new A-110 (replacing the A-100) has updated HDMI, better HDD and USB slave support, and has had its ports updated and rejiggered. In case you forgot, it already supported about one metric ton of containers and codecs and also works with streaming video sites like Revision3. It even doubles (triples? quadruples?) as network-attached storage and download stuff via Bittorrent for you. Why don’t we all have one of these already?! → Read More
[photopress:popcorna100.jpg,full,center] Well, someone was impressed by Popcorn Hour, an inexpensive ($180) networked media streamer that handles pretty much every kid tested, pirate approved codec/container, save for Ogg—Xvid, H.264, MPEG2 and MKV are all playable out of the box. Three cheers for MKV support, since that’s the preferred container for high-def movie rips these days. She even decodes 1080p video, which is sorta rare for these devices. Point of fact, my iMac even has trouble decoding 1080p MKVs if I have anything other than VLC open. You won’t be hurting for outputs either, with component video and HDMI present. That should cover most of you. I should hope it covers most of you. On the surface it looks like a winner, one that can easily integrate into your AV setup. Beware of the bugs, however. One annoying one—the video signal drops out when switching between inputs. Certainly no deal-killer, but indicative of the lack of polish that many of these devices exhibit. Oh, and it supports BitTorrent. Install a hard drive and it’ll download torrents just like that. Top that, other devices. There’s one caveat you might appreciate. The A-100 is a pain in the ass to get a hold of. You have to sign up for some waiting list to get one. Sorry, not happening. If I didn’t already have my ghetto setup, I’d look into getting one, primarily because it supports the codecs and containers Apple won’t likely support on Apple TV. Product Page [Popcorn Hour via Boing Boing Gadgets] → Read More
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