Popcorn Hour - Wish I had Sage HD Theatre

[stuckless]

Last week, my brother in law mailed me his Popcorn Hour A-110. He was having issues with it, so he sent it to me for support. I blogged about here, but to summarize.... I thought that the Popcorn Hour would be a good unit for him, since all he really wanted was to watch HD content on his TV (not a PVR).

The irony, of course, is that as a SageTV fan, I recommended that he get a Popcorn Hour, because I didn't want to support him running SageTV. He asked for SageTV, but I pushed him down the Popcorn path. And in the end, I'm still supporting him

Now, had I known that SageTV was going to be releasing a STB, then I would have suggested that he go that route, but unfortunately, this was a couple of months ago, and I had no idea that a SageTV STB was even in the works.

FWIW, the Popcorn Hour is decent device with lots of features... but I wish I had known the Sage TD Theatre was coming... I might have made a different decision.

[elcano]

Is the new Sage HD Extender really competitive with the Popcorn Hour? I mean, in standalone mode connected to a NAS? I have not been able to find any documentation on standalone mode (via NAS).

[flavius]

Did you check the manual?

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36518

[reggie14]

I'm curious, why do you think the HD200 is a better standalone media player? It seems like it has some potentially useful features that the HD200 lacks, like support for SATA drives and HDMI 1.3. Despite the static IP problem your brother had, I kind of doubt the PCH is noticeably harder to setup or use than the HD200.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I'm curious, why do you think the HD200 is a better standalone media player? It seems like it has some potentially useful features that the HD200 lacks, like support for SATA drives and HDMI 1.3. Despite the static IP problem your brother had, I kind of doubt the PCH is noticeably harder to setup or use than the HD200.

The comment about my brother in law was not in reference to how hard or easy a popcorn hour is to setup, but rather to show that now matter how easy to setup a device, there are always people that find some way to screw it up The popcorn hour is very easy to set up. Once I got the box, I was up and running in less than 10 minutes. That's including the time it took me to troubleshoot the network and setup my shares.

I agree the popcorn hour has some great features, (internal HD connectors, 1080p support on both component and hdmi, integrated upnp client and server, the list goes on). My recommendation for Sage HD Theatre was really towards the fact that, if I'm going to have to support it, then I'd rather he was using something that i'm vaguely familar with, rather than not at all. I know as soon as I send it back to him, he's going to call about some video download problem from some service and I won't have a clue what he's talking about.

But, in terms of usability, I found the popcorn hour to be quite lacking. Here is a summary of things i've noticed, just off the top of my head...
* UI is sluggish
* There doesn't appear to be a "back" button. If you want to go back to a prev screen, you have to press "rewind", which took me a few minutes to figure out.
* while it does have FF and RW buttons, there are no "skip" buttons for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, etc.
* when you connect the unit to a tv it does not auto detect the signal. You have to manually, using the remote, tell the unit to switch to hdmi 720p, or component 720p. And you have to know, that TVMODE+4 is component 720p and TVMODE+7 is hdmi 720p.
* While the online video selection is impressive, it is slow to navigate.

[emveepee]

Hi Sean,

I checked the private message I exchanged with you on the PCH, in case I misled you but I did find the message where I said the interface was "soso", slow and they really needed a faster processor to do browser. This is one of the reasons I am working on a better interface for native playing and GBPVR.

Regarding this new SageTV player, most of my reservation about the HD 100 have been removed. It still look like a stripped down first gen hardware with a bit of premium for placeshifter license which certainly is value added. For those of you who follow media extenders at mpcclub, I think you will find that even big companies (Netgear, DLINK, Linksys) fail in delivering so I really hope SageTV guys can do a better job then Syabas to make better use of the hardware and I'm really keen to see the comparison reviews as a standalone device.

Hardware-wise the second-gen A110 is going to be superior just because of DTS 2 channel downmixing. A lot of people connect their devices directly to their TV and need this. An internal drive can be a plus since that appears to be how most people use their PCH. Personally I use network shares but it is surprising why Microsoft makes this simple task so difficult.

For your problems, the left-right arrows in the centre move the file in 30 second increments, 0, 30, 60, 90 etc. You can move by percentage with the numbers or directly input a time.

You are supposed to set your default resolution in the NMT software not using the remote, that is sort of fallback, TV 0 is auto, but leaving it auto is not recommened. The newest firmware actually adjusts video rates (50, 60, 24) on the fly to match the framerate of the video and reduce judder etc. Since most good monitors can do this it is quite nice.

Next year the third gen NMT's come out followed by SMP 8644 and 8654 devices from different vendors, so I think for a while now, you will be saying that you should have waited. Gadget guys like me can't

Martin

[stuckless]

emveepee, don't worry, I didn't feel misled

I actaully like the unit, but "I wish I had Sage HD Theatre" was more to with with the fact that I have support his box, but I won't actually have one here as well, as a reference

Thanks for the reference on navigation. I haven't fully read all the documentation yet, and to be honest my experience in playing with this has been limited to just a couple of hours, so I may have been a little unjust in my summarization