Tuesday April 15
 
18:43
 
Vista and Popcorn Hour

On my recommendation, one of my friends bought a Popcorn Hour media server. Being a non-technical girl, I was given the task of setting it up for her. Sometimes I think the girls in my life use me only for my technical knowledge.

The Popcorn Hour can supposedly run without a hard drive, so to keep things simple, I hadn’t told her to buy a HDD. It had been hard enough working out how I could make buying a WIFI router easy for her – since she needed one of those also to set up a LAN.

I know the Popcorn Hour can’t run the built in Bitorrent client and file server if there’s no hard drive installed, but I thought it would still be able to see network shares. It turns out, however, that it can’t see samba shares either without the hard drive installed – well either that or the Popcorn Hour doesn’t play well with Vista shares. I wouldn’t put it past Vista to be the problem; I used it for the first time last night and it was, as expected, pants.

In the end, I had to run the media streaming server which Popcorn Hour make available for free. It kind of works, but sometimes the Popcorn Hour wont see that the server is running, and the only way to get it to recognise the server is to – unintuitively – toggle the “Support iTunes” option on and off. Weird.

I felt a bit uneasy leaving her with this slightly flakey setup. I hope I don’t start getting calls at 1am asking me to “make things work” because she can’t watch the latest episode of “Grand Designs”.

Aside: My friend’s Popcorn Hour remote is slightly different from mine – it’s a different colour, has slightly different shaped buttons, and has a strange “rb” logo with a hand. Strange.