Popcorn Hour AM-100 Media Player

I recently got hold of a Popcorn Hour and a 500Gb disk to put in it. So now finally
I can replace the XBOX Classic as a Media center, I was getting kind of fed up of the noisy XBOX.

Now the Popcorn is a small media center machine, capable of playing virtually anything, Video, Audio
and it can even stream from the internet through the POPCORN media portal, where  you can browse
Videos on YouTube, Google video, get RSS streams and alot more.

I setup the box hooked it up to my 42 inch FullHD LCD, wham !!. I had a picture and started playing around,
the only 1080p quality movie I had was Starwars Episode 3, I took the external drive where the movieclip was and attached it
to one of the two USB ports in the front of the Popcorn and after a few seconds I could see it in the media player.  

This is the first time I looked at 1080p material so I was mighty impressed, it was very clear crips and beatiful colors. The
Popcorn had no problems what so ever to play this clip from and external drive. 

Of course there were some glitches with the box, playing web radio was a little slow to buffer and to shutdown, but thats it.
During the weekend I will try out the torrent functionality, Photo slideshowing and all the other functions so I will write some
more reviews later. 

You can go to the Popcorn website  to see a more detailed specification sheet over the product. But If you are lazy here is some quick facts:

Media files supported

• Video containers:
  • MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V)
  • MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG)
  • MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS)
  • VOB
  • AVI, ASF, WMV
  • Matroska (MKV)
  • MOV (H.264), MP4, RMP4
• Video codecs:
  • XVID SD/HD
  • MPEG-1
  • MPEG-2
    • MP@HL
  • MPEG-4.2
    • ASP@L5, 720p, 1-point GMC
  • WMV9
    • MP@HL
  • H.264
    • BP@L3
    • MP@L4.0
    • HP@L4.0
    • HP@L4.1
  • VC-1
    • MP@HL
    • AP@L3
• Audio containers:
  • AAC, M4A
  • MPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA)
  • WAV
  • WMA
• Audio codecs:
  • WMA, WMA Pro
  • AAC
  • MP1, MP2, MP3
  • LPCM
• Audio pass through : DTS, AC3
• Photo formats : JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
• Other formats:  ISO, IFO
• Subtitle formats : SRT, SMI, SUB, SSA

Connectivity

• Bonjour
• UPnP SSDP
• DLNA
• Windows Media Connect
• Windows Media Player NSS
• SMB
• NFS
• HTTP servers: myiHome, WizD, SwissCenter, MSP Portal, Llink, GB-PVR
• BitTorrent P2P
• NAS access : SMB, NFS, FTP

Web services

• Video : YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, VideoCast, DL.TV, Cranky Geeks
• Audio : iPodcast, Radiobox, ABC News
• Photo : Flickr, Picasa
• RSS feed : Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Traffic alerts, Yahoo! Stock, Cinecast, Traffic Conditions.
• Peer-to-peer TV : SayaTV
• Internet Radio : Shoutcast

/tommy