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.

Monday February 25
 
13:30
 
Finally a media player that handles HD

Dinally I’m able to see exactly what my projector can achieve when it is given a proper HD source. The quality of Happy Feel (blu-ray rip) was so good at the weekend that it made my eyes hurt with pleasure (shame the movie itself was crap though).

That “woo hoo!” pleasure was courtesy of my new Popcorn Hour Network Media Tank - the little beast that is setting the AV world alight, but which is harder to get than decent Fish and Chips in Tokyo. Yip, I get mine last week, shipped into Japan. I’m one of the first 5000 to get one.

So far I’ve been blown away by how good it is. The quality of the upscaling to 720p is awesome - even subtitle fonts are upscaled smoothly. I can’t emphasize the upscaling quality enough - it way outshines the upscaling of my MG-35 (MG-35 outputing 720p), and the internal upscaling of my projector (projector upscaling 480p/576p to 720p).

Not only that, but it’s fast browsing the network (unlike the MG-35), and so far it has handled everything I’ve thrown at it (as it should, given that it’s the latest Sigma chip). It’s really nice to no longer worry about whether something I download will play or not. It just plays. And the remote control works, unlike my Buffalo Linktheater which seemingly has a mind of its own.

Now that I have the NMT connected to the projector (Sanyo Z5, 720p) and the Buffalo Linktheater connected to the SD TV, my third network media player - the Mediagate MG-35 - is presently just hanging about like a spare prick at a wedding (as my father would say). Bought in January to bridge the gap while waiting for a true H264 HD player, it failed to dazzle me with its slow speed browsing network drives, and so-so upscaling to 720p. At the time, though, I’d no idea when I’d be able to get an H264 HD player (I wont be back in Korea for a few months so will be unable to pick up a Tvix, and I didn’t expect to get to the head of the Popcorn Hour waiting list so quick). I guess I’ll keep it around for when the Linktheater breaks down.

The NMT isn’t without its teething troubles - specifically the font for subtitles with srt files (ie, not DVD subtitles or those in an mkv file) is looks blocky, and it seems to access the internal HDD frequently even though the internal HDD has no files on it - but updates to the firmware are coming quick and fast, and showing real progress. I guess that’s the price I pay for being an early adopter.

Little niggles aside, just wish there was more HD content available. Much of what I watch is UK TV downloaded from UK Nova, and there’s very little HD content there. I do wish the UK would get its finger out and get its broadband and HDTV up to decent levels (moan moan moan).