I love my Popcorn Hour PCH-A110 media player and I use it all the time to watch TV Shows and Movies. This is just one of a class of devices known as a Networked Media Tank, or NMT. I can save my shows on a hard drive or USB device that I’ve installed in or connected to the player, or watch content from any of my other computers that are connected via my home network.

If you want to learn more about this kind of device, I’ve reviewed my PCH-A110 previously on this site.

This is an incredibly useful device, and recently I found a couple of tricks to make the user experience even better!

• MediatankController 1.0 for Adobe AIR – browse and control your NMT from your PC. This is a remote control application for your that runs on any PC desktop. This is actually a cross platform App (built using Adobe Air) that can be installed on almost any computer. It provides a fully functional remote control that sits on your computer. You can also browse the media files available to your Popcorn Hour from a slick window on the desktop. Better yet, the popcorn hour responds faster to the controls on your desktop than it does using the remote, and the app provides keyboard support as well, which is far better than trying to type using the numeric keypad on the remote. This is a must have tool for any NMT owner. Although the app was built and tested on the PCH-A110, it should work on any NMT device.
• MediatankController 1.0 for iPhone – browse and control your NMT from your phone (or your iPod Touch). I actually haven’t been able to get this one to work yet, but many other people have, so I’m sure I just didn’t configure it properly. It promises essentially the same functionality as the the similarly named PC desktop app, but built as web based app formatted for the iPhone. This app has also been tested on the iPod Touch and the Android phone, so any web enabled gadget or computer with a web browser should also work just as well.
• Pure Web Remote Control. This one is a little bit less functional than the others, and a whole lot less pretty. It is a web based app that provides some of the same functionality as the two apps above. The main difference is that its design goal was to provide access to content on the NMT, via a browser based remote control, so that the user could listen to audio with TV switched off. This app also works on any web enabled phone, computer, or other gadget, and I had no problem accessing it with my iPod Touch. I have to say that it’s really ugly, but it works very well. When you consider it within the context that it was designed, it’s actually a pretty cool little app.

This is just one more way to make my life faster and easier. If you know of any other great improvements to make your Popcorn Hour media player (or any other NMT for that matter) even better, please drop me a comment and let me know about it!

Apple’s iTunes media player makes it very easy to sync your media content from your computer to your iPod or your Apple TV. It also allows you access to the iTunes online store to access additional content that you can buy or download for free, including TV Shows, Movies, Music, and iPod Apps. The software isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time and it is a very convenient way to manage your media library between your various devices.

Apple has instituted some pretty unfortunate policies with iTunes (it only works with Apple Devices for one) including a requirement that you “Authorize” each computer you use the software with if you want to access or play content purchased from the iTunes Store using your Apple Account. This is a form of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and it is required even if you access only free content.

One potential issue users face with this policy is that Apple will only allow you to authorize up to 5 computers at any given time. If your computer dies, you sell it, or you make major changes to it, then you would have to use up an additional 1 of your 5 allowable authorizations on a new or upgraded computer.

You can “Deauthorize” an individual computer, or once in any 12 month time period you can “Deauthorize All” of your computers at once. You must be able to access iTunes from one of your previously authorized computers, so be sure to do this prior making any major changes to it, having it serviced, or before you sell it or give it away.

To Deauthorize iTunes from ONE of your computers:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Choose Store > Deauthorize Computer (In earlier versions of iTunes, access this option from the Advanced menu).
3. Select “Deauthorize Computer for Apple Account” and enter your Apple ID and password and Click OK.
4. A message should appear saying that “This computer has been successfully deauthorized.”

Note that in some cases one computer may be taking up more than one of your Authorizations. If you suspect this to be the case, simply repeat the above steps until you see a message saying that “This computer was not authorized. To authorize this computer, play a song or video you have purchased using this account.”

To Deauthorize iTunes from ALL of your computers:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click iTunes Store in the menu on the left side of iTunes.
3. If you’re not signed in to the store, click the Account button, then enter your account name and password.
4. Click the Account button again (your ID appears on the button), enter your password, and then click View Account.
5. In the Account Information window, click Deauthorize All.

You are now free to Authorize additional computers to work with the iTunes Store!

Remember that you can only “Deauthorize All” once in any 12 month period, so use this feature carefully. You would be better to Deauthorize individual computers rather than blowing away them all at once.

I like to watch TV.  My computer is setup in front of my big screen so that when I’m editing photos or otherwise geeking out (which happens a lot) I can have the TV on in front of me.  I watch a lot of live sports, especially NFL in the fall, the Tour de France in July, and the Olympics ever second year.  And of course I watch NHL hockey.  I’m Canadian…

But other than watching live sports, I live a very busy life and I normally can’t find the time to sit down to watch TV at the same time my favorite shows are on (prime time is an imaginary thing in my world).  And I don’t like to watch most of the garbage that’s on outside of prime time which is generally when I do finally get to sit down to watch TV.  So that’s why I like to watch pre-recorded shows such as those available for download from many, many resources on the internet.  (I’ll leave it to you to Google “download TV” to find some of those sources.)

One major problem with downloadable media (including movies, music, TV shows, and even other web distributed content such as video feeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler) is that it comes in a wide variety of formats, qualities, and aspect ratios. And most people have no way of getting that content to their television without going through major hurdles.

There are many ways to get that content onto the TV, but until recently none of them were very easy.  Over the years I’ve gradaully migrated from being forced to watch the content on my computer, to being able to burn VCD’s (video CD’s) or eventually DVD’s to watch on my DVD player attached to the TV.   Burning discs has never been fast, and for most people it involves converting the downloadable AVI files (also known as DivX or Xvid files) into a DVD format that the DVD player and the TV could recognize.  This can take hours even for a typical episode of a TV show.  This got better when DVD players started to be able to play DivX and Xvid files without conversion (even now those players are pretty rare), and better yet when you could plug in a USB thumb drive containing your content (extremely rare).  Unfortunately these players are only as good as the firmware they come with, and they typically don’t keep up with the newer media codecs.  That results in media files that can’t be played on the player or that pop and skip and lose synchronization between the audio and the video.  Not to mention that it can still take significant time to copy the files from the computer to the device.

What I’ve really wanted for a long time is to be able to directly connect my computer to my Home Theatre AV system using my local area network.  I really don’twant to have a separate computer in my living room (ie. a media center PC), and I don’t want to be limited to the codecs that Apple Supports on the AppleTV.

There didn’t seem to be an ideal solution until I recently heard about the Popcorn Hour products, which belong to a class of devices known as “Networked Media Tanks” (NMT). These are uber gadgets for the uber geek, and they do exactly what I want:  they play almost any visual media format I want to display on my TV; they connect to my network, wired or wirelessly; they are very small and very quiet; they work.  As a bonus they are basically small computers (running an OS variant of Linux), so they are infinitely customizeable and they can be seen and controlled by the other computers on your network, and even from over the internet.  They are UPnP and DLNA compatible (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; it’s a good thing) and they can stream media to AND from your other network devices.  In short, they are awesome!

I recently picked up a Popcorn Hour PCH-A-110.  It came in a nice box with everything I needed to hook it up to my TV, including an HDMI cable (it works fine with standard def TV’s too).  I added an old laptop hard drive that I had lying around (it will accept most 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HDD’s, but you don’t even need to install one if you don’t need it), and I plugged it in to my network with an ethernet cable.  I’m still working on getting it connected wirelessly, but that’s not a big deal for me right away.  In a very short time I had it up and running on my network and I was able to watch TV shows and movies directly from the other computers on the network.  I was even able to watch some episodes of MASH that I have in Matroska (.mkv) format that up until now I’ve only been able to watch on my computer using the VideoLan VLC media player.

The audio and video quality is amazing and I’m extremely happy.  My favorite part is that I was able to copy all my TV shows and movies over to the internal HDD for instant access, I’ve got utorrent setup to automatically download new episodes of my favorite TV shows onto it, and I’ve programmed my Logitech Harmony Remote to control it.  It fits seamlessly into my existing Home Theatre setup and my life just got a little bit easier.  I’m a very happy Popcorn Hour owner.

I listen to lots of podcasts on my iPod.  I’m geeky that way. I spend lots of time in my car while driving to and from work and I find that podcasts really eat up time way faster than music ever does.  And I get to learn something too, so that’s always good.

I also listen to music, but I usually just hit the shuffle button or create a quick Genius playlist, so this doesn’t really impact me there.  Back to podcasts…  When I listen to a podcast, or a playlist full of podcasts, I rarely get through all of one episode before arriving at my destination, and I basically never get through an entire playlist.  If I hit pause when I get out of the car, and then don’t use my iPod until I get back in the car then I can simply wake it up, hit play, and roll on.  But if I change to a different playlist, which of course I do because nobody else wants to listen to my podcasts, then I lose my place in my previous playlist.

Which brings me to my point.  Why doesn’t hitting pause while playing media from a playlist get treated as a “playlist pause” rather than as a “file pause”?  Essentially I want my iPod to remember exactly where I was in my playlist and just start up from there the next time I use that playlist.  Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.  Maybe there’s an app for that?

Anyone have any good ideas to make this work?  Apple, are you listening?