About 6 months ago I upgraded (read: replaced) my home theatre PC (HTPC) with a brand spanking fancy pants machine which, basically, kicks ass. My criteria second time round was for it be to quiet and be able to play 1080p MKVs with no problems. I settled on an ATI-based system using the funky new motherboards that do the decoding onboard in a sub-$100 Antec HTPC case which is so quiet my projector sounds noisy in comparison.Fast forward to today and look what I'm sent, an item which fills all my criteria and then some, the Popcorn Hour A-110 "Networked Media Tank". Ignore the stupid name for the moment and take a look at the stats on this $215 USD RRP ($344 AUD, the cheapest price we found) baby. It decodes/plays pretty much everything including video and audio streams in MKVs containers and outputs via HDMI 1.3a, optical SPDIF audio and others. Has USB inputs and a single USB output so you can even use it as an external hard drive (i.e. copy files directly to it from your computer).
What's more is you can whack a hard drive in it and use the inbuilt BitTorrent web client to do your totally legal downloading for you. It has networking protocols up the whazoo and is tiny enough to put up on a shelf somewhere out of the way.
There's a handy video review below for those of you who don't like reading words or there's this Engadget UK review for those of you who do. I have to say I disagree with the reviewer's comment on optical audio. I've used optical SPDIF since my first MiniDisc player back in 1994 and not once have I had a problem.
Thanks for the tip Ottey!
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