How’s everyone doing? Sorry it’s been so quiet on the update front. We’ve been swamped with a few recent projects.

We recently setup a larger storage facility at our US office to acommodate reseller shipments of the PopBox units. PopBox is now available in the United Kingdom through Advanced MP3 Player. If you’ve been looking for a low cost device to access BBC iPlayer, your wish has been granted.

Speaking of PopBox, in March we launched the PopBox 3D release. Just to clarify, it was a free firmware update to all our existing customers adding the much anticipated stereoscopic 3D support. We worked with Matroska on this and natively support their mk3d container. In addition to the 3D support, you get the same stable and easily accessible release we’ve spent the better part of a year working on. The feedback from our users has been extremely positive.

We’ve also launched our MLB.TV app on our PopBox device. You can get more information on that over here. And as mentioned before, we launched the BBC iPlayer for our UK customers on the PopBox as well as our Popcorn Hour A-200, A-210 and C-200.

In Popcorn Hour related news, we are working on an international release of our Network Media Jukebox software. Right now it’s only been available in English, however we’ve been making the required changes so you can select your preferred language. I know a lot of our European customers have been asking for this one.

We’ve been working on adding the ability to download subtitles for your videos. This will help those that might want to watch foreign films that don’t have subtitles. For me, I’ll finally be able to understand all those Russian comedies my friend keeps watching while I’m at his place.

Right now, we’re putting some final touches on a beta firmware for the C-200 right now which adds support for Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture, Dolby Digital + downmixing, formatting support for 3TB hard drives, auto colorspace and auto resolution. The last four are both coming to the A-200/210 shortly afterwards.

For all our existing A-200 customers, we’ve also come out with our A-210 chassis kit. If you want the brushed aluminum and fan-less design of the A-210, you can pick up the kit on our online store.

Like I said, we’ve been busy. We’ve got a lot of new updates coming down the road with our software so stay tuned.

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to get in a post before the end of February. Unfortunately it’s going to be a bit short today as the real news should be dropping in the next couple of weeks.

First off I want to let everyone know that our PopBox online support is up an running. Please visit http://support.popbox.com/ to access it. It will be fully linked in when our new site launches in the next week or so. Phone support should also be up and running soon. Right now we’re just waiting on AT&T to transfer our toll free number to our account. We finished setting up the phone system last week for it so when it does go live you’ll be hearing the voice of our internal IT, Vlad, greeting you. Recording the greetings was pretty hilarious; you will not believe how many re-takes we did for some of them.

In other PopBox related news, we’re close to a new firmware launch. we’re targeting a mid March release. Alongside it will be at least one “premium” app. These apps usually tie into some subscription based service offered by our premium content distributors. I can’t name names until release though, so keep an eye on the press releases.

PopBox will also be making an appearance at the RE/MAX conference in Las Vegas. If you’re attending, Steve Young -our marketing guy- will be setup at a kiosk showing demos and selling units. For those of you who don’t know, we’re partnered up with RE/MAX to give their realtors access to the RE/MAX University.

In the world of Popcorn Hour, one of our community members has started beta testing their Yet Another Movie Jukebox (YAMJ) flash UI skin. For screenshots and more info take a look here: http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showthread.php?tid=50184.

And that concludes our February post. Stay tuned for more news and information.

Hey folks! Hope everyone has enjoyed their January.

CES was fun this year. Our schedule wasn’t nearly as hectic as last year giving us a bit more time to peruse the showroom floor. Some things I enjoyed seeing were the new TVs. Nothing revolutionary, but I really like how companies are trying to minimize the bezel around the display. The glasses-free and passive 3D tech looked interesting. The passive technology definitely helps reduce cost considering the shutter glasses cost $60+ a pair, but it didn’t seem to perform as well.

As for our own products, we were showing off a few new things. First was Eyecon’s app. A lot of people want to queue up content or control their players from tablets and phones. We have the support right now for Popcorn Hour and are in the process of adding it for the PopBox players. We’ve had a bit of fun in the office where all of a sudden one of the units at someone’s desk will come out of standby with funny images or video. That usually turns into a virtual battle of who can put the most interesting media up on screen from their smartphone the fastest.

In addition, we had a 3D TV setup to show off our 3D MKV support. What that is is 3D Side-By-Side (SBS) or Top-And-Bottom (TAB) media playing on supported sets. And it’s not just MKV, but MP4, TS and other containers that support the technology. 3D MKV is the standard in which we are supporting. Our beta testers are currently testing it out on the Popcorn Hour players and the PopBox won’t be too far behind it.

We also announced that we were developing a box using an Intel CE4100 processor. The software is in early stages of development and we’re looking to add in features that aren’t possible with our Sigma platform. We don’t have any specifics to give out just yet, but it should be an interesting addition to our existing lineup.

One last topic I wanted to touch on is our technical support. Right now we’re in the process of reconfiguring our tech support for PopBox customers. We’re still available by email, but the phone support line and online support is still being setup. The online support section is being hammered on now and we’re waiting on our local telephone company to get our toll free number setup. With any luck we should have everything up and running in mid February. Popcorn Hour support is running as normal and once phone support is up we will also be taking Popcorn Hour calls on that line. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who is being patient with us during this transition.

Back to work now. Until next time!

Happy Holidays!

I don’t know about you, but I”m looking forward to the holiday break. We’ve been working non-stop on some projects to get ready for CES 2011 and some time off will be a welcome break in our busy schedule.

One of those projects is our new website. As you might have noticed, Syabas.com has had a bit of a revamp. One new feature that we’re looking forward to adding is this “News” section. Taking inspiration from some other well established, community driven companies, we will be using this section to post updates on what’s going on at the company. We’re going to keep this section more casual, so for you serious folks jump on over to the “Press” section.

What you can expect here are stuats updatese, sneak peaks, and insights from some of our office staff. In addition to giving our valued community more face time, we will be working on more videos, contests and other items to enrich the community experience.

Our next update will be post-CES where we talk about the things we saw, the feedback we received and just how awesome the show was (or wasn’t). Until then, check out the rest of our new site, take a gander at our Popcorn Hour and PopBox websites or visit our excellent community forums.

See you next year!