michaelhong.com

I recently preordered the Popcorn Hour A-110 ($215, popcornhour.com). It’s basically a media streamer that can play any media type you can throw at it. Seriously. A-N-Y. Check it out. One of the best media streamers I’ve used thus far is my trusty modded XBox loaded with XBMC. Unfortunately (for the XBox), I’ve started to download some HD files, including the .MKV container, which the XBox 1 cannot play. I currently use a hacked TV (it has Perian, Sapphire and nitoTV installed) but even with the modifications it’s unable to play .mkv files due to hardware limitations. I got some great use out of my new-ish quad core Hackintosh, using VisualHub to convert the .mkv files to something my TV will take. The only nice thing about using TV to playback my files was being able to use Lostify to properly tag my video files and add episode/movie descriptions. However, the encoding wait time and the multiple copies of files I have are starting to bother me.

Currently, in my living room I have my Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, TV, and my TiVo Series 3. I’ve started to rip my DVD collection and store it on my Hackintosh. I’d love to stream my DVDs to any of those devices but to the best of my knowledge, none can stream VIDEO_TS folders. OK, well theoretically my softmodded TV with nitoTV should be able to play VIDEO_TS folders, but I’ve had mixed results and nothing is more frustrating than having the movie cut out in the middle. I’ve thought about picking up a Mac Mini and loading Plex, an indie fork to my beloved XBMC. The UI looks elegant and beautiful. However, it’s a little out of my price range and having a Mac Mini just sitting on my entertainment center seems like overkill when I just want to stream my media.

Enter the Popcorn Hour. It has a robust online community over at networkedmediatank.com and the reviews are nothing but extraordinary. It doesn’t come with (or need) a hard drive, but you can add one or enjoy streaming out of the box. One downer for some people is that there is no built-in WiFi, but all of my networking stuff sits behind my TV. The ethernet port is 10/100, so no gigabit here, but based on the bitrates of the stuff you’ll be streaming, you won’t miss it, unless you spend time transferring files to the Popcorn Hour’s hard drive.

Popcorn Hour also has the older brother for sale, the A-100, for $179. The A-110 is merely an update, rather than a replacement, to the A-100. The differences can be found here. The worst thing is that there is a waitlist. As of September 10, they’re shipping preorders from August 5-10. Argh. The wait is killing me.