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Networking Audio/Video review : Popcorn Hour A-100

We have had the Networked Media Tank( NMT ) from Popcorn hour in the office for about a month now and we wanted to share with you our findings. We have been waiting for this device to become available for a long time now and we can't tell you how excited we are to finally have it at the office. So after about a month of testing we can say that this is one of the better streamers we have had the opportunity to test out. One of the main draws of the NMT is its ability to playback just about any format you can throw at it. Other then a few audio formats it played back everything that we tried. To many streamers focus on a few formats and leave out so many of the really popular ones. The people at Popcorn Hour must have realized that there really weren't that many streamers that could just play everything so they threw it all in the NMT.

Another huge feature where the NMT rises above the crowd is its ability to grab media in so many different ways. You can add an internal hard drive and just playback from that, or you can connect to devices on your network via Samba or NFS. Additionally it will pick up UPnP and HTTP media servers. This is probably the most full featured streamer we have come across to date in terms of how it can access your media. It just packs so many options in there that it has been hard for us to figure out something else we would want.

Check out after the jump for our detailed look into how this beast of a media streamer performs when we put it to the test.

So lets start with a little general setup. Like we said above, this can connect to your network in a bunch of different ways. Traditional media streamers will use Samba to connect to your server to grab its media. This is normally fine, but if you are running over a wireless link and streaming large files this could become a bottleneck. The NMT can use NFS instead which offers much greater speed when it comes to streaming these files. And while this is very impressive to us and something that makes this box shine in our eyes there are some problems. There appears to be issues with how the NMT uses NFS in conjunction with Gigabit LANs. The NMT could connect to our server via NFS, but it never was able to see any of the content there. Many others in the Popcorn Hour forums were having similar issues and it seems to have something to do with Gig routers/switches and the MTU negotiation between everything. This normally would make us pretty unhappy, but the dev guys over at Popcorn Hour have made their Samba streaming top notch such that we haven't ever had a problem with streaming over it. So no NFS for us, but it is there and it works for some, so thats gotta count for something.

Video Playback

Because of thie lack of NFS we obviously went with Samba as our choice of network protocols. Even over our wireless hop the connection was great. Playing back 4GB ISOs happened without much delay at all. Usually streamers do a lot of spinning while they tried to load this much data, but the NMT handled it without a problem. Playback was equally impressive with no stutters or frame dropouts.

One area that many streaming devices fall down is in their ability to fast forward and rewind videos. The NMT didn't have any problem fast forwarding or rewinding at any speed, whether it be 2x or 32x. They have done a great job with making this a smooth process. We have tested out a bunch of devices that have serious issues when you try and use their fast forward and rewind functions. The NMT even offers a great feature that we have never seen on any device we have tested: time seek. By hitting the time seek button on the remote you are presented with an on-screen menu displaying the current time in the video as well as its overall time. You can use the navigation keys on the remote to select the an exact time in the video that you would like to skip to. This feature works perfectly and is something that we wished more companies would include on their devices. Sometimes you need to shut the video off before finishing and it is usually a pain in the ass to get back to where you left off. Now you just have to take note of the time in the movie that you stopped it and you can jump right back there with time seek.

Music Playback

Here is one area of the device that we were not happy with at all. Once again the quality is top notch, but where the device has problems is the interface. When you select a song to play you are presented with only the most basic of information regarding what is playing. There is no notion of grabbing the ID3 tags or showing you any kind of progress bar or even cover art. You also can't navigate away from the playing screen without stopping the music which makes playing a music filled slideshow that much harder. Unfortunately with many of these multi-function devices it seems that the video aspect gets the most attention and everything else seems to take second fiddle. This is very evident with the NMT where the music and photo sections are functional, but that is just about it. We would have liked to have seen some more work go into the music playback section. Hopefully this is something they will address in a future update, but as it stands currently music playback is pretty lame. We couldn't see using this for our day to day music streamer.

Photo Viewing

The photo viewing aspect of the this device is decent. It will display the popular formats out there ( JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF ) and the image quality is what you would expect. The images look good enough, but unless you have a nice HDTV they aren't going to look like they do on your computer. The resolution on SDTV's and low end HDTVs will make the images look a little less sharp then you are use to. There is also a problem with navigation in that it isn't very easy to scroll through your pictures. You can see the names of files, but browsing the actual picture is not so straight forward. There doesn't seem to be anyway to select the next picture while you are viewing one. The common option is to hit the right arrow on the remote to go to the next picture in the folder, but for some reason the NMT makes you hit stop, which takes you back to the main list, and then you have to select the next image. This is definitely not the ideal way to view your pictures on your television. The supposed purpose of devices like these is to make the experience of viewing your media on your TV a pleasant one. The image viewing on the NMT makes you want to just go to the computer and use some photo viewing software and deal with the smaller screen since the overall experience will be better. We understand that the main feature of these devices is their ability to playback videos, and we also understand that the photo viewing aspect usually takes a back seat to the video, but here this is a little much. We wished they had spent a little more time polishing this aspect of it to make the NMT truly one of the best devices on the market.

Web Services

Here is where the NMT starts to pull ahead of a lot of other devices out there. They have a fairly robust set of online services that you chose to view a variety of online content. This is the direction that most of the new media streaming devices should be moving to, allowing users to browse content from the Internet and play it back via their streaming device. The connection to these services is relatively slow on the NMT and the loading times can become somewhat annoying, but it doesn't make it unusable. Just the fact that you can do this all through a device hooked up to your TV and not needing to be in front of a computer is a great thing. Of course the experience wasn't all peachy as we encountered some problems with the NMT and its ability to fully access all that they promise.

One major issue we had with the online content was that the way they have designed the interface it makes it almost impossible to get back to the main web services menu without going all the way out to the main menu. Each time you use the arrow keys to highlight another item it stores it as your last action so when you hit the back button it just goes to the last video you selected. If you happened to have watched 10 videos you would have to push the back button over 10 times to get out of the screen that you are on. We would have liked the back button to have taken us back to the last screen we were at and not the last item. Small annoyance sure, but it is things like this that can really annoy us( what can we say, we're a pissy bunch :) )

As for the video services themselves we tried playing videos from Google Video and YouTube, but none of them would actually play. Our only guess is that it worked at one time, but for some reason Google may have changed something or whatever and it no longer works. MetaCafe was a different story as every video that we tried there worked fine so maybe it is just Google and something they are doing, who knows. We went around and checked out just about all of their offerings in the web content section and we were left with two thoughts. First we were very impressed that we were watching videos of the Internet and it didn't really seem that way in terms of speed and quality. Our other thought was how much crap is on the Internet. This is where the web services has an issue currently. If all you are providing is user created content from the likes of YouTube and MetaCafe you are subjected to a lot of crap and so after awhile the web content aspect of this devices wears off. If there was the ability to hook into some better more polished providers that had some serious content then this would be a homerun.

BitTorrent

Now comes one of the shinning jewels of the NMT: the ability to download BitTorrents for you. We hate having to leave our power hungry PC on all night so we can download a large torrent. With the NMT you just upload the torrent file and it will start the download for you. This way you can leave this lower powered device on for days as it sucks down all the torrents you want and you don't have to see your power bill shoot through the roof. We found that the Bittorrent experience was much better then we expected. We can see this as being a huge draw for this device. Setup a bunch of torrents at night and when you get home from work you have it all there for you to watch. One nice closed system instead of having to transfer files all around the place.

Conclusion

So all in all this is a great device that lives up to all the hype that it has been getting. Sure there are a few warts here and there like the terrible interface and design of the music playback, but we are confident that these issues will be addressed soon. The video aspect of the device is top notch and rivals any networked media streamer out there. This gets a big thumbs up from us and we will be adding to to our main entertainment center unlike so many others that end up in the junk pile. We will have a couple of more articles in the future going over some other aspects of the device and some updates with other things we find out. So until then stay tuned and hope that they speed up production so these can be more easily purchased.

Contributed by David Ficocello