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!

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.