Here’s my review of a nice little box i picked up, called the Popcorn Hour A-110.

First of all, What is a “Popcorn Hour”?

The PCH A-110 is a so-called Networked Media Tank, or NMT.
It’s a small 300 MHz Linux-based computer equipped with a Sigma SMP8635 chipset, 256MB of DDR SDRAM and 32MB of Flash memory.

The PCH A-110 enables you to play movies and music, and also watch pictures stored on any disk or machine in your local network on your TV or HiFi system. The box support a long list of media types, both audio files and video files (up to 1080p). Check the official PCH site for a full list of supported formats and specs.

The PCH A-110 does not come with an internal hard drive, and you don’t really need one unless you’re planning on running additional software (BitTorrent client, SMB server, FTP server, UPnP server etc.) on your box, or simply need some storage for your media files. However, if you do put a drive in your PCH, it will make a great partner for travel, as it is small (270 mm/10.5″ x 132 mm/5.25″ x 32 mm/1.25″) and lightweight (1 kg/2.2 lbs) and easy to hook up to just about any TV setup.

Setting up and getting started.

The PCH comes in a small box containing everything you need to get it up and running. It’s got a good quality HDMI cable, some other cables to use if your TV does not have a HDMI connection, a nice remote control (batteries included), screws for HDD installation, and a power adapter.
What the box does not contain is a proper users manual, but a Quick Start Guide is included, and that’s really all you need at this point. A more comprehensive users manual is available on the web.

On the front of the A-110 you’ll find a USB 2.0 port, and a small reset button. On the back there’s another USB 2.0 port, a USB 2.0 Slave, a 10/100 Ethernet port, a power swith, and these options for hooking the thing up to your system:

• HDMI v1.3a (up to 1080p)
• Component Video (up to 1080p)
• S-Video
• Composite Video
• Stereo Analog Audio
• S/PDIF Optical Digital Audio

The USB ports can be used to hook up external HDD’s, a keyboard, or a Popcorn Hour WN-100 – a 802.11n WLAN adapter.

To get it up and running, you simple plug in all the cables where they’re supposed to go (I assume everyone can figure that one out, since they all tend to fit only where they’re supposed to be), and power it up with the switch on the back. Then turn your TV to the appropriate AV-channel and wait for the boot process to finish up. This can actually take a couple of minutes, since the PCH is a small computer, with only a 300 MHz processor – probably half the power that your cellphone have.

Once the boot process is done, you’ll end up on a nice “Home Screen”. You’ll see four self-explanatory symbols (Video, Audio, Photographs and File Browser), and also three links on your left – Media Source, Web Services and Setup.

The first thing you need to do is to enter the Setup and let the PCH know about your TV settings, like what resolution it should use, and stuff like that. This shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two. You also need to stop by the Network Settings and type in your settings (Will the PCH get an IP from a DHCP server, or will you need  to configure it manually? Will it need a password if it’s connected wirelessly? etc.). Simply go through all the categories and check if there’s anything you’d like to change.

The next thing will be to add shares for your PCH to stream media from. That’s a fairly easy process, and basicly what it means is that you need to enable file sharing on your computer, and pick the folders/disks which contain the files you’d like your PCH to have access to. I am not going any deeper into that subject, since the process for network sharing varies from platform to platform. What you want to do is set up either SMB or NFS shares, or a combination. I would recommend to use NFS for all HD shares, and SMB for everything else.

After setting up the shares on your computer, you need to let the PCH know about them. This can be done from the Setup menu, or you can add them from the Media Source menu. It is also fairly straight forward, and the Quick Start Guide will guide you through it.

Ease of use.

Once your shares is configured, your PCH will list them on your Media Source menu, and you should be able to navigate and watch/play/view whatever you want.

The navigation is an easy thing to get a hang of, as it is just like your Windows Explorer or Finder windows on your computer, with folders and subfolders and so on, depending on how you’ve organized your files, of course.

Once you find a file you’d like to play, just hit play, and the movie starts after buffering for a couple of seconds.

Installing a HDD

Installing a hard drive in your PCH is extremely simple. All you need to do is to unplug the powercord, remove the four thumbscrews on the top, and you’ll see the inside of your box:

As you can see, there’s plenty of space for the HDD.
The A-110 uses a SATA interface (as opposed to the older version, A-100, which used IDE/PATA) and you can use either a 2.5″ or a 3.5″ disk. There has been some issues with compatibility with the disks, so make sure you check out this list before shopping. That way you’ll be sure that everything will work properly. I got the Western Digital Caviar Green Power WD10EADS (1 TB) and it’s working like a charm!

Please note, thought, that some disks can get quite hot if you’re, say, transfer files for four hours or something, but I’ve never had any problems with that. Some people chose to install a small (30 mm max) fan inside the box just in case. The fan installation is also simple. You simply plug the cable onto the board, move the jumper to get the appropriate amount of power to your fan (5 or 12 V) and you’re done.

Anyway – to install your disk, just place it in your PCH and slide it to the left to connect it. Once you’ve done that, you get the small bag of screws that came with the PCH and secure the HDD from underneath. Then put the lid back on the PCH (this is actually important, since there’s a “pad” on the inside of the lid that helps to cool the system) and power it back up.
Now, go to Setup > Maintenance and select NMT Setup Wizard and follow the on-screen instructions.

To transfer files to your HDD, you simply connect to it with a FTP client, like Transmit (Mac OS X), FlashFXP (Windows) or FileZilla (Mac OS X/Windows/Linux). FileZilla is a free, Open Source application, so that’s a good pick if you don’t want to pay for one of the others, but I listed those as well, since they are my favorite FTP apps on their respective platforms.
To connect to your drive, just start the FTP application, and use ftpuser as a username, and 1234 as the password. The Server/IP setting depends on your network. I use 10.0.1.10, since that’s the IP I’ve assigned for the PCH in my router settings.

You can also mount your internal PCH drive on your computer, as a SMB or NFS share, but I’m not going into that here. Do a quick Google-search if you’d like to do this.

Summary and thoughts.

Well, I guess this turned out more like a summary and explanation, and also kind of a guide, to the PCH A-110, but that’s OK.

So what do I think of this box?

The PCH A-110 itself is brilliant! It is easy to hook up and easy to use. It requires a tiny bit of geekness, since you have to set up the networking and shares, but you don’t have to be a hacker to figure it out. If you cannot manage it by yourself, use Google, or join the excellent NMT Forum, where you’ll find great help quickly.

Those of you who read this post carefully might have noticed that I am mostly talking about the video side of things. That’s because that is all I use my PCH for. I’ve tried out a couple of other things as well, but I didn’t find them equally brilliant.

Music

For music, I find the PCH to be useless, to be honest. It might be because I am used to a Mac, and iTunes, and in iTunes you’re not supposed to care about the files, since it’s the music itself that’s important. When I tried navigating through my music on the PCH, I felt that I was instantly back in 1996, om my 133 MHz Pentium PC, jerking around with the files and Winamp and shit. That’s just not good enough for me. I might be able to fix this, and make it better by using some kind of “Music Jukebox” software, but I’m not going to even try, since I am happy with my current music system. Right now I have my HiFi hooked up with my Airport Express router with Airtunes, streaming wireless music from iTunes and Spotify (for Spotify I use the Airfoil software since Spotify does not support Airtunes by default) and I use my iPhone 3G as a remote control. This works perfectly, so I do not have any plans of changing that setup any time soon.

Photos

If we’re talking photos, I really haven’t tried it yet. The reason for this is that I really don’t spend much time looking at photos, so when I occasionally want to, I just fire up iPhoto on my 24″ iMac instead. I suspect the photo part of the PCH is just as sucky as the music part, and since my iMac is stationed in my living room also, iPhoto is the way to go.

Web Services

The PCH comes with built in support for a lot of Web Services. These services includes YouTube, Flickr, Break, Bliptv etc. For a complete listing, please visit the PCH Website. I’ve only tried out YouTube and Flickr so far, and they work OK. Some of the videos on YouTube suck in quality, even on a 10″ netbook screen, so of course, those are gonna suck even more on a 42″ or 55″ plasma. If you are planning on using these web services alot, I would recommend that you hook up a USB keyboard to the PCH, so you don’t have to use the remote control for searching and such.

Networking

When I ordered the PCH, I went for the A-110 and WN-100 bundle as I was planning on streaming everything wirelessly from my iMac.
Well… that didn’t work out all that well. I was able to stream SD videos, but that’s about it. I had my network set up as n, but with backwards compatibility to b and g. That is probably why HD media, such as a 720p Blu-Ray rip did not work. I got about two minutes of video, and the rest were just stuttering and lagging.
I could probably fix this by going n exclusive, but I didn’t want to do that since my iPhone 3G does not support the 5 GHz band.
So, what I did was I just moved my router, and hooked it up to my PCH with an ethernet cable. The iMac is connected wirelessly, and now I can stream whatever I want without lagging and stuff like that. I also get great speeds when transferring files to my internal drive using FTP.

All in all

If your main goal is to get rid of all your DVDr plastic laying all over your house, the Popcorn Hour A-110 is the perfect choice.

The default skin is not overly exciting, but it is the nicest looking skin I’ve seen so far. There’s plenty of skins on the web – some of them are OK, some of them butt ugly. But that’s all up to personal preference I guess.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I’d like to give the PCH a 9.5 for video, and a 2 for music and photos.

It can be a tiny bit slow sometimes, but not slow enough to get pissed over.

That being said,

it’s when you get around to using software like YAMJ (Yet Another Movie Jukebox) the PCH really start ruling the world.
More on that later :)

- n5k

Thanks to chris57 and dc11ab at the NMT forum for letting me use his screenshots for this review!