Popcorn Hour A-110, ultimate streaming

About a month ago I received my media box; more spesifically the Popcorn Hour A-110. I had been hearing quite a bit about that particular box and looked forward to get it. For those of you whom does not know what it is: short version – networked media station. I’ll even be so kind that I will insert the description from the vendor here:

The Popcorn Hour A-110 is an enhanced version of the popular A-100 model. It adds support for 2.5″/3.5″ SATA HDD and USB Slave functionality to improve connectivity and transfer rates. HDMI has been updated to the 1.3a spec, allowing full support of HD Audio pass-through for DTS HD-HR, DTS HD-MA, Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD. The ports on the device have also been reconfigured, with a USB port moved to the rear panel, optical S/PDIF replacing the co-axial S/PDIF and a hardware reset button to allow for easier use of the device.

Popcorn Hour A-110 allows you to pull in digital video, audio and photos from various sources for your enjoyment on your HDTV or Home Theater setup.

You can stream or playback your digital media content from a variety of sources, such as your PC, NAS, digital camera, USB mass storage devices (Flash drive, HDD, DVD drive) ,  internal SATA HDD and even directly from the Internet via the Media Service Portal.

It also serves as a NAS and a BitTorrent peer-to-peer downloader to eliminate the need to switch on a PC or other device for this purpose.

The Popcorn Hour A-110 supports the latest high bitrate video formats (MPEG2 MP@HL, H.264 HP@L4.1, VC-1 AP@L3 in TS of at least 40Mbps) to give you up to 1080p high-definition videos.

In recognition of advances in Internet TV, the A-110 supports peer-to-peer Internet TV streaming technology from SayaTV, as well as popular unicast internet TV such as YouTube, Revision 3 and Vuze via the Media Service Portal.

The A-110 firmware is upgradeable to support future media containers, codecs and features.

Needless to say, my expectations were sky-high and boy did they live up to it. Hooking up the hardware took just a few minutes, going through the configuration was done in minutes and then I was ready to start exploring the possibilities of this new hardware. I bought a 1 TB disk that I stashed inside of this, and quickly started to copy some HD material over to it, to test how it performed. And running HD material in both 720p and 1080p went without any hussle at all. Though the real power of this little gem comes with its networking abilities. First of, with network attached you can go straight on to the internet, watching youtube and over 40 other online streams by the click of a button – quality of it is all OK. Though if you then install myihome (which is a streaming server), then you can practically do anything.

I setup myihome on a small computer I have, attached some external USB disks and configured myihome to read from those disks. Then sat down in front of the TV, refreshed the source list – and there it was, my computer. Then just with a few clicks on the remote, I was then browsing my pictures, music or any video clips you might have on disk. I downloaded some HD trailers from Apple and surely, without any problems at all, it streamed without problems over to the TV. One thing that came to mind, being a frequent photographer – and my better half taking even more photographs, we tend to have them gathered all over the place. So I figured, what happens if I just make one directory, and make shortcuts to all the locations there. And what would you know, it worked like a charm. I even tested this by placing some HD trailers in different locations, making shortcuts to them in a “MOVIES” directory, renaming them so it would look nice and surely, now I had a complete list of the “movies” all in one place.

The torrent part I haven’t tested much, though from what I gather by others that have tested that part, it as smooth as the rest of the elements that I described above. So if you are looking at buying a networked media hub, or want a simple way to reach your content on your TV, then this is a definitive choice.

Learn more here:

• Popcorn Hour.com
• myihome streaming server (windows, linux and macosx)