This could probably be the last media player you’ll ever need in your living room.The Popcorn Hour is an integrated video processor tucked inside a small portable casing that plays almost all of the popular media files out there, plus some more. It’s like the open source version of the Apple TV.
The guys at HD Media World came over to demo the Popcorn Hour at home. The player can decode various media types from DivX, Xvid, mkv, mpeg1/2/4, WMV9-HD, MOV as well as stream content directly from the internet such as YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video.
It also supports peer-to-peer TV (SayaTV) and internet radio (Shoutcast) as well as several of your favorite tech podcasts/vidcasts like Twit, Cranky Geeks and DL.TV. It has some sort of built-in browser to view photos from Flickr and Picasa as well as an RSS feed reader.
Best of all, the Popcorn Hour can actually download your torrents directly into the optional HDD. Storage can be an external HHD, a built-in HDD or a USB drive. To download torrents, just transfer the tracker into the internal drive and start the downloads. You can set how much bandwidth (upstream/downstream) to allocate so you don’t choke the entire network.
People with HDTVs at home will get the most of these types of media players. The Popcorn Hour can HD movies up to 1080p. It also uses just 36 watts of power so you can leave it on 24/7 when downloading torrents and save up on electricity as against running it on your PC.
Check out their Multiply site and if you’re interested, just mention you found about it from here and maybe they’ll give you a discount.
You can surf the web using your popcorn hour using the remote control or USB keyboard
If you think EEE box can do the same job as popcorn hour you’re wrong. Popcorn hour is a mediastreamer not a low powered pc with low specs. I’ll say they can be used together. Buy both and use Swisscenter or any other good frontend on the EEE box and stream it to the popcorn hour. In that way you use the best of two worlds. EEE box can’t show HD video, popcorn hour can..With popcorn hour you can’t surf the web from your TV, with EEE box you can.
I’d be wary of purchasing the Popcorn Hour. Mine arrived today and it’s apparently D.O.A. It really seems to be a Mickey Mouse outfit running the show.
Judging from posts on the NMT forum, I don’t think I’m the only one stuck with a piece of junk. Once I pay for all the shipping and the restocking fee, I’ll be out over $100.
You’ve been warned.