A couple co-workers of one of my friends have the A-100 and I guess they love it. I was just getting ready to start building a home theater PC so I could easily get my MKV format movies on my TV and realized for $179 this looks like a hell of a lot more user friendly (read, my wife might actually be able to use it) option.
Looks like it will play pretty much every format out there, even ISO.
My roommate has one of the older ones that didn’t come with a hdd or wifi. It’s a pretty neat device that’s pretty easy to use and runs most content fine, I do think it struggles a little bit with 1080p stuff. I have heard the newer versions are a fairly big improvement though.
I considered the PCH, I used the A-110 and just wasn’t happy with the control / power / etc of the unit and the HTPC fit my needs much more. I was able to use XBMC and my Harmony remote to create a user face easy enough my mother could figure it out.
In March we took a look at the original Popcorn Hour A-100 and it quickly became our in-house media playback device of choice. Sure, it wasn’t perfect - but its near flawless display of 1080p content, along with its incredible ability to playback almost every file we threw at it, made us sit up and take notice.
We’ve had the Popcorn Hour for about two months and in all our tests - we’ve tried at least two hundred different videos of various formats, codecs and resolutions - only five files refused to play properly. And in all five cases, it appears that the files themselves had issues. Two refused to play on our codec rich PC and upon closer scrutiny, the other two appear to have had VBR (audio) issues. The final problematic file refused to play because the audio was not interleaved properly.
The best way to sum up our playback test results is to say that we found it incredibly hard to get the Popcorn Hour to not playback our files. 720p, 1080p. All flawless. AC3 - no problem. This goes for playback from an internal drive, external USB drive (connecting a generic USB drive via USB), streamed via wired Ethernet or even via external USB DVD-ROM drive.
I have a guy coming tonight to look at that headboard I had for sale, and my wife gets her bonus next week. Pretty sure I can squeeze $200 out of the budget.
lol i feel like justa4door and 4doorbabe with this IM session we got going here, however, the only thing that would potentially concern me is support for new/upcoming formats. I still have a hard time believing they are going to stick with MKV container for long term… it seems to have so many bugs.
wonder if they would release firmware updates and what not
edit: DLNA support, nice, i can finally see if that makes any difference with my DLNA certified NAS lol.
LOL - yep was just browsing the popcorn hour site and saw that they have lots of firmware releases… STELLAR. crap, impulse purchase is kicking in hard right now - must resist until 5pm when i go home.
They’re selling A-100 refurbs now for $99. For that price I couldn’t resist and ordered one today. Refurbs ship out in batches with the next one being 9/3. Will update with a review once I have it.
