Just ordered my popcorn hour, anyone want to touch me ?

[Dominic]

never been so pricey

[Shug]

never been so pricey

Back to yer LPs and Cinefilm, grandad

[DDtB]

Can't really be bothered reading up on what this is all about...

Summary of features and reasons to buy please Shuggles.... chop chop!

[Rag_It]

Summary of features and reasons to buy please Shuggles.... chop chop!

Call yersell a salesman?!!! - features and benefits as the man above has point out 'and i have to add Shuggles at the end!'

[Shug]

Jeez-o - actually do have some work to do, you know.

Okay - in a nutshell of factyness:

Digital Media player - links to a home network and streams media (any video or audio) across that network (wired for reliability, but with a wireless adapter available) or from the internet. You can slot in a hard drive (we sell one with a 500GB pre-installed) for storage as well - whereapon it acts like a network drive, so PC's connected to the network can access it. Also can act as a download client, so you can torrent or stream media from the internet.

Key Pluses:

- Compatible with just about everything - HiDef content included
- Open source - you can completely re-write the user interface to whatever you want it to do
- Standalone - don't have your PC downloading media, the Popcorn hour will do it itself
- Future proofed - as anything can be in this market - can be updated for new filetypes etc.
- It WORKS! There's a few of this kind of device around, but they are either limited in what they support (stand up Apple TV) or horribly unreliable. This is neither.

Excellent product if you already have a lot of media stored on hard drives. Easy enough to rip DVD (and Bluray) now, so your existing disc collection can also go on there - no more lost/scratched discs and searching through piles of DVDs in the lounge.

[Sanjøy]

And from a users perspective:

1. Download movie off any torrent site in any format
2. Stick movie on mem stick/usb drive/network drive and plug it in to the popcorn
3. Press play

720,1080, DTS, Dolby Digital, totally silent operation (I stream from my NAS)

[Gooldie]

Any recomendations of what torrents sites to use?

[DDtB]

And from a users perspective:

1. Download movie off any torrent site in any format
2. Stick movie on mem stick/usb drive/network drive and plug it in to the popcorn
3. Press play

720,1080, DTS, Dolby Digital, totally silent operation (I stream from my NAS)

Well Santa brought me the C-200..... and ... well....

Calling Sanjoy!!!!!

[D50]

One satisfied customer - we've had one for months and it's fantastic - obviously from the legendary Shug of course.......yep! well worth the money.

D50

[Sanjøy]

Nice, it needed the gigabit nic upgrade.

Have you upgraded your bband accordingly ?

[DDtB]

Nice, it needed the gigabit nic upgrade.

Have you upgraded your bband accordingly ?

Let me know when you're back..... I have an ever growing list of questions for you!!!

bband on 20meg just now....

[Jamie84]

Always been a little confused with the whole "streaming" thing but finally getting around to setting it up over the next few days as I just got my new onky reciever for xmas

So...My plans are to use my laptop to stream media to my DNLA compatible LCD TV , which is then obviously through my amp. I have the TV hard wired to my Router and the Laptop Wireless to router . I will use "samsung share manager " on my laptop .

So what the difference in using a laptop to using this popcorn thingy ? is it really just for ease of use and conveniance?

[Sanjøy]

Your samsung software will not play dick and you cannot stream 1080 over wireless.

[DDtB]

Your samsung software will not play dick and you cannot stream 1080 over wireless.

Hurry up and come home ffs..... I need yooooooooo!

[robin]

Uncompressed digital 1080p requires 50 Mbit/frame approximately. So assuming you're talking about running 25 frames per second then you need a continuous bandwidth of 1.25Gbit/s (this will scale linearly with frame rate - so 50 frames per second is 2.5Gbit/s, etc.). That's not available even to wired users (wireless tops out at 108Mbit/s, mostly, wired is 1Gbit/s unless you have newer 10Gbit/s interfaces which are mostly restricted to server equipment at present).

DLNA is a closed standard - it costs $5000 to buy the specs, apparently, so even though they're no doubt leveraging the mountain of free s/w out there, the DLNA members have chosen to keep their standards proprietary. For that reason alone you should not use it. See: http://gxben.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/w ... l-so-much/ for an overview of the protocol (it's crap, of course).

Anyway, back to the topic - you _can_ stream 1080p over wireless to DLNA device because DLNA doesn't stream raw video (as indeed it could not - see above maffs), rather it streams MPEG (or WMV) in a rather limited set of profiles; these will correspond to the broadcast profiles for HD; for MPEG-2 that's 10-20Mbit/s and for MPEG-4 that's <10Mbit/s. So either of these will go over 802.11g provided the network is running at full bandwidth with no interference.

The mandatory MPEG component in any HD media distribution rather makes a mockery of the HD standard in the first place (yes, there are more pixels, yes they flick on and off more quickly, but the only way we can drive all those pixels is to send the media compressed with blurr-o-vision MPEG-2 (ever wondered where those strange blocks come from on digital broadcast displays? They're caused by MPEG running out of capacity to encode the information in the display, so it gives up)).

Still, with the hype out there you would think it was no longer possible to watch television without HD ...

Cheers,

Robin