Popcorn Hour A-410 Quick Review

If you’re a movie buff that still uses USBs or portable hard drives to watch your media then you’d want to check this out. The Popcorn Hour A-410 is a media player that carries functions and features to further enhance your viewing and listening experience. Is it a good acquisition for serious media geeks? Find out.

The Popcorn Hour A-410 with its included remote.

The Popcorn Hour A-410 is basically storage for all your media – videos, music, and photos. An HDD (not included) is loaded to its tray which is enclosed in a sturdy, aluminium case. There’s nothing much going on in terms of design except for an IR sensor for the remote along with two LED lights that show the device’s status.

At the back we have all the necessary connectivity ports and slots including an HDMI, USB 3.0, and Ethernet ports.

On the right side we have the lock for the disk bay as well as a built-in SD card reader and one USB 2.0 port.

Turning it over reveals the cooling fins that help in expelling heat from inside its chassis.

A-410’s dashboard page.

After plugging the A-410 to power it up, we were led to its dashboard with large icons that are pretty straightforward. Navigating through its UI was responsive enough with very little to no lags – mainly due to its dual-core processor and 1GB RAM tandem.

Your movies can be viewed as gallery where posters are lined up in order.

The included remote control works fine with all the essential buttons possible to operate with one hand, but due to either its buttons or Infrared sensor, pressing a command doesn’t push through 100% of the time. In addition, all the buttons light up which is good for watching in the dark.

After choosing a movie, it will bring you to another page with the movie’s synopsis and other details before you can begin to watch.

We played several Full HD movies on the A-410 and picture quality was impressive. Its VXP image processor steps up the game with better contrast and well-saturated images, although some jaggies are still seen especially when blacks are right beside colorful areas. Another good news was that it didn’t show any form of delays in audio and video but if ever it happens, there’s a setting to manually sync the audio with the video.

The A-410 shows good color saturation and contrast between light and dark areas.

With the use of its built-in DAC, the sound quality was delivered well on medium to high volumes. Although when we tried maxing the audio levels out we experienced slight distortions and noticeable pops in dialogues.

Overall, we had fun using the Popcorn Hour as our media buddy for a few days. It was convenient to use, has an array of connectivity options, and produces eye-candy images. Our gripe, only, is that it comes at Php13,500USD 230INR 19,502EUR 219CNY 1,675 which is pretty steep for many people.  It throws in a free Wi-Fi dongle worth Php1,500USD 26INR 2,167EUR 24CNY 186 but it could still be considered as an investment for casual users.

If you’re an avid collector of multimedia files and have some budget to spare, the Popcorn Hour A-410 is a good buy.

Popcorn Hour A-410 specs:
800Mhz SMP8911 dual-core processor
VXP image processor
1GB RAM
ESS Sabre DAC
2x USB 2.0 host
1x USB 3.0 slave
1x eSATA
1x SD card reader
1x SATA
Gigabit Ethernet
Infrared
182 x 158 x 56mm
1.3kg
Power: 12V DC, 3.0A max

Video/audio output
HDMI, component, stereo audio, S/PDIF optical, coaxial

Suppoted file formats:

Video
M1V, M2V, M4V, M2P, MPG,VOB TS, TP,TRP,M2T, M2TS, MTS, AVI, ASF, WMV, MKV, 3DMKV, MOV, MP4, RMP4, 3D BD ISO

Audio
M4A, MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA, WAV, WMA, FLAC, OGG, TTA, AAC, DTS, DSD

Photo
JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF

What we liked about it:
*Responsive UI
*Straightforward navigation
*Lots of connectivity options
*Impressive picture quality
*Decent sound quality
*Remote lights up

What we didn’t like:
*Steep pricing
*Doesn’t come with an HDD for its asking price
*Pressing the buttons sometimes don’t push through