I have been in pursuit of a perfect media player for a few years now and have tried many different alternatives and none have delivered the experience that I was looking for, I don’t want much, just a nice interface that is family friendly but most importantly support for different video types and an easy way to organise them.
I have tried Windows Media Center and with an extender and an Acer Revo Ion Nettop all proving to be too complex and annoying to use, most recently I have just been using an Xbox 360 but messing around with video converters and getting rips to play properly has been an absolute nightmare.
Step forward the Popcorn Hour C-200
This box, I was going to say little box, but it’s quite large actually, roughly about the same size as a Sky HD box and is designed to sit under your TV.
The whole idea is that the box is a gateway to your stored media, either by fitting an internal SATA drive, attaching USB hard drives or connecting to network attached storage.
The codecs that this machine supports is amazing, nothing I have tried so far has caused it any problems, including MKV, AVI, DivX, MP4, Mpeg, DVD ISO, Blu Ray ISO the list goes on and on, it just works and reads everything, including all HD content and the playback is smooth and pin sharp.
I am not going to say this was easy to set up, its not an out of the box consumer device, in its raw form the popcorn hour looks like a basic file manager, lists of files and folders with no artwork make it very user unfriendly, sure it plays everything but the wife and kids wont use it like that it, just looks too complicated.
Enter YAMJ (Yet another movie Jukebox), this is an html movie jukebox that transforms the Popcorn hour into a beautiful system.
YAMJ has all the tools built in to gather information about your video files including synopsis, artwork, genres and actor information. It catalogues them in a layout that is perfect for a video jukebox.
It also gathers all the information from TV Episodes but be warned, your files have to be named correctly and this took me a while to grasp, once its done I have not seen anything that comes close to how it works and looks, simply stunning.
My jukebox contains all different file types including many DVD Isos and they are all handled seamlessly from the GUI and play perfectly.
This Popcorn Hour C-200 is one powerful machine and I have not even scraped the surface of what it can do, it has internet access via the ethernet port so streaming YouTube is available and lots of other services, music and photo access, it goes on and on and I haven’t even mentioned that you can install a Blu Ray drive.
Why did I want this, well to playback my media without worrying about the format or having to re-encode my videos, does it do this, oh yes, perfectly, this is the device I was dreaming about and now it is a reality.
Thank you Popcorn Hour!!!!
Supported Media File Formats
Video containers:
MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V)
MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG, DAT, VOB)
MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS)
AVI, ASF, WMV
Matroska (MKV)
MOV (H.264), MP4, RMP4
Video Decoders:
XVID SD/HD
MPEG-1
MPEG-2 MP@HL
MPEG-4.2 ASP@L5, 720p, 1-point GMC
MPEG-4.10 (H.264) : BP@L3, MP@L4.0, HP@L4.0, HP@L4.1
WMV9 : MP@HL
SMPTE 421M (VC-1) : MP@HL, AP@L3
Audio Containers:
AAC, M4A
MPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA)
WAV
WMA
FLAC
OGG
Audio Decoders:
Dolby Digital
DTS
WMA, WMA Pro
MPEG-1 Layer 1, 2, 3
MPEG-4 AAC-LC
MPEG-4 HE-AAC
MPEG-4 BSAC
LPCM
FLAC
Vorbis
Audio Pass-Through:
DTS, DTS-HD HR, DTS-HD MA
Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD
Other Formats:
ISO, IFO navigation
AVCHD navigation
Blu-ray** ready (requires addition of compatible BD-ROM and at least 2GB USB memory stick)
Photo Formats:
JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF
Subtitle Formats:
SRT, MicroDVD SUB, SSA, SUB/IDX
Damn that look very impressive