Popcorn Hour A-110 Does Your Evil Bidding

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!

Video Playback, Windows 7 FTW

If you've ever tried to set up a computer to play the varying forms of videos you can get on the internet these days then you probably know how much of a headache it can be. Codec packs have been the answer for a few years now (I'm currently using K-Lite for my home theatre PC) but news today may make them a thing of the past.

On Long Zheng's blog, I Started Something, he has posted an item detailing the Codec support found in Windows 7 and how Microsoft's "Vista 2.0" will play almost everything out of the box. Great news for those of you who "acquire" TV episodes or "backup" your own DVDs as most MPEG4 formats are supported (XVID/DIVX/MP4 et al) plus those whacky 3GP Codecs your mobile phone is so fond of.

What interests me the most is the support of the H264 (MPEG-4 AVC) Codec, which is the current standard for high definition video encoding, and the total lack of support for the Matroska (MKV) container format (just like the Xbox 360/PS3) which appears to be totally intentional on Microsoft's part.

I'll keep my eye on this one and props to Microsoft for at least making our Codec Pack horrors slightly less painful.